The more things change the more they stay the same – David Moore shot the images in Pictures from the Real World on a council estate in Derby in 1987-88, when Thatcher was in power and the post-war consensus   > Read More]]>  

The more things change the more they stay the same – David Moore shot the images in Pictures from the Real World on a council estate in Derby in 1987-88, when Thatcher was in power and the post-war consensus on the Welfare State was giving way to harder attitudes towards the “undeserving poor”. Now the project has been published as a slim hardback book, while Thatcher is back in the headlines and a horrific murder case on a Derby estate is being used to question the role of welfare payments. Moore says he doesn’t believe photography can elicit social change and on the evidence, he could be right.

Even so, his project retains a palpable power. Shot while he was studying at the West Surrey College of Art and Design in Farnham (under Paul Graham and Martin Parr and alongside Anna Fox and Paul Seawright), the 18 images collected here show the everyday experience of poverty, a world in which children wear coats indoors, sofas have taped-up rips and bedrooms have bare floorboards. From a lower middle class background Moore felt uncomfortable with the “ethical dimension” of the project and didn’t push it at the time (although it was published in Creative Camera on Parr’s recommendation); now he feels time has taken the sting out of the ethical quandary but has still re-edited the work, replacing an unflattering picture of a woman watching TV with a kinder alternative, for example. Moore might not believe images can advocate but he knows this project is provocative nonetheless.

In fact Moore has kept the original title because he likes its sense of provocation, its assertion of the reality of the world he depicts over the young upwardly mobile aspirations being promoted at the time. David Chandler, in the essay published in the book, traces a similar ethos in Moore’s use of colour, linking his images to Graham and Parr’s and arguing that only colour photography could take on the brash world of competitive individualism and material consumption then prevalent in glossy ads (and other media). “The poetic gradations of black and white simply couldn’t deal with the fine details of this new social reality and the implicit ironies it offered up” he writes, and Moore’s images bear him out. In Pictures from the Real World colour only serves to heighten the dirt, the grease stains, and the sheer visual overload of large families crammed into inadequate homes. In other images the clash between aspiration and reality is laid bare – the cheerful world depicted in Care Bears wallpaper contrasting sharply with an orange smear and a retro wrestling poster, for example.

Moore says he wasn’t aware of any new tradition of British colour documentary at the time, but he was inspired by Graham and Parr and now recognises how his work sits with theirs and later series by Richard Billingham and Nick Waplington. Even so, his project remains an insight into a way of life rather than a dry aesthetic experiment and as such the “ethical dimension” remains, as it does with all the photographers he’s grouped with. A picture of three huge birthday cards suggests his curiosity about working class taste and style, for example, which in turn raises questions about his role. Is he a tourist in a world exotically different to his own? And is he holding up his subjects for sympathy or condemnation?  

Moore says neither, he just recorded what was there and perhaps that’s for the best, because while the images certainly capture poverty, they remain silent on the key political question, then and now – whether the poor are deserving or not. It means his book avoids easy answers and patronising political posturing, leaving us with a time capsule that’s nonetheless still disturbingly relevant today.

I’m glad it’s finally become a book; I hope it inspires other young photographers to take on similar projects today.

- Diane Smyth

I was interested to hear of a new book on the subject of ‘video film sculpture’ from the consistently interesting Black Dog Publishing. This, I surmised, would set out the main ways in which moving images interact with objects   > Read More]]>  

© Tony Oursler 'Legion', 1996

I was interested to hear of a new book on the subject of ‘video film sculpture’ from the consistently interesting Black Dog Publishing. This, I surmised, would set out the main ways in which moving images interact with objects or with the gallery space, and tease out their underlying conceptual frameworks. Those ways might be loosely split between the technology taking on its own sculptural presence (eg Nam June Paik, David Hall, Peter Campus, Rosa Barba); sculptural means of  installing videos in space or in presentational structures (eg Dorothy Iannone, Bruce Nauman, Michal Rovner, Auernout Mik); total installation environments with sculptural and video aspects integrated (eg Mika Rottenberg, Erik van Lieshout, Lindsay Seers, Jennet Thomas); projections of moving images onto objects (notably Tony Oursler, but also Laura White, Trisha Baga or even Shana Moulton’s use of her own body in performances with video). It would, as a by-product, serve to map some of the ways in which the gallery presentation of film can justify its location by doing more than mimic cinema or TV.

That book, however, remains to be written. The Paradoxical Object is attractively illustrated, but fails on the other key counts of methodology, style and selection. 

Truckenbrod does not define her scope. That makes it unclear why Stan Brakhage’s straightforward film, for example, is included, along with Bill Viola’s relatively conventional video presentations. She develops no coherent methodology as she proceeds from one work to another under four broad headings (‘The Hand Becomes the Lens’, ‘Sculpting with Light and Time’, ‘The Body’ and ‘Transforming the Physical’). There’s little sense of how individual works relate to the overall concerns of the artists. The book doesn’t really attempt a conclusion: there’s a summary of sorts in the last paragraph’s statement, under the heading ‘Material Immaterial’, that ‘video film sculpture embodies the disparateness of the immaterial stream of light that projects the film or video simultaneously and the sculptural form or object that captures the narrative imagery[1]’ – but that could equally read as a starting point.

Stylistically, much of the text is written in slippery, jargon-filled prose with lots of repetition and a sprinkling of grammatical errors. It often seems to dress up the obvious: take ‘creating an haptic visuality, the eye embraces the experience of touch roaming over the surface of the object experiencing its tactile qualities[2]’. Does that really mean more than ‘seeing this, we imagine touching it’?  Much of the text consists of descriptions of video works, which can pretty soon get deadeningly second-hand: here’s 10% of Truckenbrod on her own Lightening in My Blood:  ‘Two videos, projected from opposite sides of a large handmade fiber cocoon, were caught on the fiber sculpture and visually fused inside of this large vessel. The handmade chrysalis informs this installation injecting the sense of transformation[3]’.

Worse, though, is the selection of work to discuss. My choice of descriptive example is no coincidence, as Truckenbrod herself rapidly emerges as the most important artist, with 15 works very fully illustrated and described at length.  I would think 25% of the book is about her. Even were Truckenbrod the accepted leader in this field – and she doesn’t rate a mention in Michael Rush’s ‘Video Art’, which I reckon takes an informed view of the 100 most significant practitioners – this would be embarrassing. And the balance of the other material is also somewhat eccentric. Susan Collins and Ann Hamilton – both interesting, but not really seminal – are the others who feature most, with six works each. Yet of the figures I mention above, only Paik and Oursler feature at all, and then at lesser length.

A worthwhile challenge, then, remains: to provide a balanced and rigorous analysis of how art operates when moving image and sculptural elements are combined.

- Paul Carey-Kent

Ryan Gander’s AMPER5AND turns on 60-odd black and white photographs in the unnumbered central section of its 220 pages.  They show objects from his personal collection, which form the starting point for a series of elliptical essays. Gander is   > Read More]]>  

Ryan Gander’s AMPER5AND turns on 60-odd black and white photographs in the unnumbered central section of its 220 pages.  They show objects from his personal collection, which form the starting point for a series of elliptical essays. Gander is a particularly wide-ranging artist who commissions a huge variety of work, but the essence of his practice is, in Gander’s words, that ‘the works I make are vessels for back stories, cultural collisions, ideas about para-possible histories and how those parallel histories may affect the world around us. The objects aren’t really art works as much as off-cuts, receipts and by-products of thinking. The thinking is in fact the artwork.’[1]

Consistent with that, Gander is a master of the lecture as performance. He wheels back and forth in front of a slide show: telling stories, recalling his childhood, expounding art and non-art theories, cracking sly jokes, adding curious asides and making surprising connections. This book gives an alternative, more permanent form to such entertainment. 

Photo / essay contents to give you a flavour include Mushroom Knife; Coloured Toilet Paper (‘the very existence of black is vaguely preposterous’); Macaron; Ryanair Box (‘produced… solely to illustrate the volume of positive space available to their customers to store hand luggage’ but shown here in defiance of the airline’s curious objections); Vajazzles; Decommissioned AK47 (‘repulsive as it is marvellous’); Smoked Vodka; and Sol’s Pussies (‘a model… of a work by the artist based on the moment Sol LeWitt conceived his incomplete cube series, which is said to have begun as a scratching post for his cats’ – but which a visitor to the studio praised as art). And there’s an extended account of Gander’s interactions with children who rearranged the component pieces of a Rietveld chair to test the extent of their modernist instincts.

Gander enjoys such riffs of self-referential logic as noticing that ‘the word ampers& contains itself’; that the key quality of the A4 paper size (‘that if you fold it in half, its height and width hold the same ratio as before, but the sheet is just smaller’) can be illustrated by a blank double page in the half-A4-sized book; or how, though we typically think of mirrors as something in which to see ourselves, the security mirror is a ‘deviation from self-gazing – its function, in an idealistic sense, is to view the reflection of nobody. These mirrors are used to check that there is no person lurking in a secluded space…’[2]

Gander commends a friend for arranging bookshelves in the centre of his living room so that he can get at both front and back, placing the books he had read with the spines pointing one way, the books he hadn’t read pointing the other way. ‘Ingenious’, says Gander, ‘would suit my inability to read a book from the start to the finish, only on the verso side I would show the spines of the books, not that I hadn’t started, but books I haven’t finished’ [3]. He can hardly complain, then, if you don’t read his book right through – and that certainly isn’t necessary, though it’s easily done.

So, it’s a breezy read. But to what end? I think the photographs are key here. For though at one level it’s true that ‘the thinking is in fact the art’, it makes a significant difference that there are associated objects, that there is some substance beyond the thinking. Does thinking need a physical result of some sort if it’s to emerge as art rather than literature? Gander’s book is in part a dance around the question of how much grounding in the concrete world our imaginations require.

- Paul Carey-Kent

When does the English winter start and end? From November or December to January, February or March? The answer isn’t simple, as Richard Hamblyn points out in his essay on Jem Southam’s latest publication The River WINTER. He   > Read More]]>  

When does the English winter start and end? From November or December to January, February or March? The answer isn’t simple, as Richard Hamblyn points out in his essay on Jem Southam’s latest publication The River WINTER. He says there are at least three categories of winter to consider – astronomical winter, meteorological winter and cultural winter – which kick off in November, December and January, depending on the weather. And while partly a reflection of the Earth’s wonky passage through space and time, he adds, winter is also a cultural construct.

For Southam, winter begins in November – 22 November to be exact, with a shot taken at the River Exe at Bickleigh in 2010. Shot in Southam’s characteristic 8×10 large-format, this image shows a tree extending some bare and some still-autumnal branches towards the water – much of the background is still green and yellow, but the foreground picks up the harsh blacks and icy blues of the new season. By way of contrast, before the title page Southam includes an image shot nearby in Autumn, which looks idyllically verdant by comparison; over the proceeding 38 images, he traces winter all the way up to 28 March and the delicate new leaves bursting out at Brampford Speke.

Hamblyn is an academic at Birkbeck College with a background in “eighteenth century topographical and geological writing”; Southam specialises in topographical surveys, returning to single stretches of land over and over again to build up his series of work. For this series he has focused on “stretches of the Exe river and its tributaries in Devon, England”, following the passage of a single winter through gentle, unassuming images and noting the date and place each time. A visual diary unfolds, recording the beautiful frost at Leat, River Culm at Rewe on 06 December, and the winter light on white birches at Whiptail Wood on 11 December. The snow, when it appears on 20 December at Taddiforde Brooke, comes as a surprise; the pale sunrise – or maybe it’s sunset – and the stark black trees at Silverton Mill on 10 February look almost unreal they’re so graphic. Like a Japanese woodcut showing the bleak midwinter, they recall other depictions of winter that, as Hamblyn points out in his essay, range from Pieter Bruegel’s depictions of deadly winters to Virginia Woolf’s exuberant descriptions of the Great Frost in Orlando.

Southam’s images are less obviously fictionalised but they too take a partial view, depicting an English countryside that is unpeopled and, seemingly, untouched by man. In doing so he evokes a season that has recurred every year for millennia, but by recording each scene so meticulously he also shows individual instances that will never be repeated. The winter unfolds day by day, each one, like the season, both cyclical and particular.

-Diane Smyth

Photography is rarely a static medium. As advances in technology are made, photography shifts and adapts to meet the new parameters. In just over a decade the photography world has situated itself within the digital ether and pollinated the   > Read More]]>  

Photography is rarely a static medium. As advances in technology are made, photography shifts and adapts to meet the new parameters. In just over a decade the photography world has situated itself within the digital ether and pollinated the media world with clusters of pixels and data. But what happens when photography finds itself in the presence of things past?  In the face of this collision an uncanny contemporary is born, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of Polish fashion photographer Paulina Otylie Surys.

It would be too easy to label Surys a fashion photographer, although that is undoubtedly the reason for her presence within several of the world’s premier fashion magazines, most notably Vogue. But like most good fashion photographers – Deborah Turbeville and Sarah Moon for example – the outfits anchor Surys’ images in the ‘real’ and simultaneously provide an epicentre for her imagination to germinate and expand into a series of mythological and symbolically-driven tableaus. The garments become part of the overall composition and a rather subtle point of focus.

Surys’ images bring to mind medieval tableau paintings, the work of the Italian masters, contemporary photographers such as Joel Peter Witkin and Sally Mann, and even obscure gems such as E. Elias Merhige’s 1990 experimental horror film, Begotten. Navigating your way through the book can often feel like you’re winding your way through the corridors and rooms of a strange baroque mansion that appears to exist outside of time. In each of the rooms a strange narrative unfolds in front of your eyes.

Surys’ prints (all of which were produced using 35mm, medium format and large format cameras) begin life as black and white, silver gelatin prints before being subjected to a series of techniques based on 19th century processes. She will often embellish her photos with waxes, oils and toners, hand dyes and are, in some cases, produced using the wet-plate collodion process. Surys’ images, with their unique and impossible to duplicate imperfections, are clearly motivated by her admiration for the love and precision with which artworks were once made.

Yet, crucially, Surys’ images never slide into the trap of simple nostalgia. While she employs these old techniques, it is more an aesthetic means to an end than a commentary on the craft of ‘real’ photography. Perhaps her thinking is akin to fellow photographer Joel Peter-Witkin’s comment that the process of shooting, processing, printing and manipulation is ritualistic: the images are, in one sense, an evocation of a time and place that only exists in the world of Surys’ imagination. In fact Surys’ pictures almost appear to have been dug up from the earth in a time that never truly existed.

Worth mentioning as an end note is just how beautifully produced Limbo is. Everything from the cover to the black paper that bookends the volume is lovingly produced. This is one of only four books produced so far by newcomer Paulsen, a publisher who aims to promote new and upcoming independent artists through high-quality books. While self-publishing may be all the rage, it’s worth noting that there are still some publishers that are worth keeping an eye on.

 - Oliver Atwell

Lisa Barnard’s new photobook Chateau Despair was born out of a commissioned photo-project in which she documented the abandoned Conservative Central Office at 32 Smith Square – HQ for the Tories from 1958 to 2004. The majority of images   > Read More]]>  

Lisa Barnard’s new photobook Chateau Despair was born out of a commissioned photo-project in which she documented the abandoned Conservative Central Office at 32 Smith Square – HQ for the Tories from 1958 to 2004. The majority of images in the book are interior photographs of a building that has lost its place in the world. Scratched walls, empty hallways, missing appliances – these are the signifiers of architectural decline. The overall impression of malaise is underscored by the colour blue, the official colour of the Conservative Party. The images are purposefully ‘cold’: both in terms of colour symbolism and in terms of Barnard’s dispassionate photographic methodology.

Barnard makes some surprising discoveries in the abandoned building: a forgotten pair of shoes, a tear in the shape of a laughing mouth cut into a studio backdrop, or, what appears to be, a bright red rocket leaning against the wall. These photographs, subtly humorous yet still matter-of-fact depictions of an interior space, are strongly reminiscent of the work by the Canadian photographer Lynne Cohen. Despite the lack of people in these images, the presence of man is emphasized by these quirky interventions.

Looming over this body of work are a number of scanned images depicting the former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Her status as political and ideological icon in the UK is emphasized by including several seemingly identical images of her. Although in each image she is shown with the same bright red lipstick, the same immaculate hair, and the same confident smile into the camera, each image differs slightly from the others, as well as to the extent it has physically deteriorated. Watermarks and dirt are creeping up on them, while a fingerprint gives an indication on the actual size of the original photograph. The decline of the building is thus mirrored by the imperfections represented in the damaged portrait of Thatcher.

Inasmuch as the photobook documents the remains of a once-thriving party headquarters, the project also alludes to Thatcher’s immense impact on political, economic and social issues in the UK. Her knowing smile not only affects our reading of the interior photographs of Chateau Despair, it equally affects our understanding of current debates such as those on housing, social security, immigration, foreign relations or economic policies. Her presence is akin to that of a phantom. This is particularly the case with regard to the current Conservative-led coalition government that consistently tries to locate its own position in relation to the Thatcher years. 

In spite of the re-emergence of Conservatism in the UK, the photographs strongly allude to the collapse of an ideological and political framework. The abandoned rooms at 32 Smith Square perhaps evoke comparisons with representations of other fallen regimes such as Daniel and Geo Fuchs’ photographic series on STASI buildings in the former GDR. To the back of the book is a collection of fifteen scanned images of objects Barnard has found in the building. Chateau Despair fulfills the archaeological function of archiving a vision from the past.

- Marco Bohr

At the core of Luke Stephenson’s work is a reflection of Britain and British culture, highlighting its eccentricities often hidden from the mainstream. Starting with the simple idea to photograph budgies, An Incomplete Dictionary of Showbirds developed into an   > Read More]]>  

At the core of Luke Stephenson’s work is a reflection of Britain and British culture, highlighting its eccentricities often hidden from the mainstream. Starting with the simple idea to photograph budgies, An Incomplete Dictionary of Showbirds developed into an expanding aviary collection of birds of all shapes, sizes and colours. Evolving from the original intentions to photograph more exotic breeds, the images uncover the culture of bird fancying, an ageing hobby revealing a layer of British culture practiced by eccentric hobbyists and collectors.

The images show a taxonomy of show birds against a muted colour backdrop which accentuate their features, each one numbered corresponding to their species name and Latin equivalent catalogued in the back on the book. Finches, Canaries, Budgerigar, Lovebirds, Sparrows and Parrots all sit on their perches in the studio, presenting themselves to the photographer’s lens. The sub-culture of bird fancying is a codified system and Stephenson portraits works within a framework of accepted show bird photography, a language with its own rules. The work has an anthropological feel, with each bird presented to be dissected by the discerning eye. The formal nature of the portraits means that each feature, each feather and idiosyncratic detail is captured and accentuated.

The birds are often paired in the book layout with other show birds of similar breeds; the similar forms, colours and patterns emerge through this juxtaposition, which leads the viewer to notice subtle differences between the highly bred animals. The viewer’s eye may be drawn to a splash of colour that differentiates the Diamond Sparrow and the Diamond Dove for example. These combinations work throughout the books to create relationships that flow from one image to the next creating a cohesive narrative.

The portraits take on humanistic qualities as we instill values and characters into the birds. It often seems as if the birds are posing, the curve of a beak makes the bird look as if its smiling or give it a mischievous grin.

Animals bred by humans say as much about the culture that breeds them as the birds themselves. These birds appear at the intersection between nature and culture and the values we instill in looking and breeding these animals comments as much on society and its relationship to animals as it does of the culture of birding, which breeds the birds to be collected, bred and presented for show. 

Much like a dictionary, this book is about classification, of the birds, those who breed them and the sub culture it has founded. The book presents the product of this culture, the birds but leave it open for interpretation. The viewer is left to make their own assertions about those whose collect these creatures.

Venturing into this peculiar world, the artist ended up going native, with a collection all of his own, vast but incomplete. With his  camera Stephenson has captured and documented this hidden culture lost in the British consciousness but kept alive in sheds, aviaries and shows across the country.

——–

More information on An Incomplete Dictionary of Show Birds is available here.

Olivia Arthur’s photobook Jeddah Diary is a fascinating insight into the role of women in Saudi society. Photographed over a period of two years, Arthur reveals aspects of this culture which usually remain hidden from the West and indeed   > Read More]]>  

Olivia Arthur’s photobook Jeddah Diary is a fascinating insight into the role of women in Saudi society. Photographed over a period of two years, Arthur reveals aspects of this culture which usually remain hidden from the West and indeed within Saudi Arabia as well. In that regard, the first image immediately sets the tone for the rest of the book. It shows a huge wall built next to a swimming pool of a private property. In the accompanying text Arthur writes: ‘The first thing I saw in Saudi were the big empty roads and houses with impossibly high walls. Everything seemed to be happening somewhere else, out of sight, behind closed doors.’ In the book Arthur thus metaphorically climbed behind this wall to depict lives that would otherwise remain out of sight.

In the first instance, Arthur photographs women, sometimes by themselves, sometimes in a group with other women who mostly wear variations of the abaya, the black cloth that covers the body, and the hijab which covers the face. In these photographs, their individuality is signified by various fashion accessories that are visible: sunglasses, handbags, or perhaps the shoes. The marginalized role of women is dramatically symbolized in a photograph that shows the packaging of an inflatable swimming pool. The package design, aimed at a Western market, depicts a white middle class couple happily playing with their children. Yet on the shelf of a Saudi store, the woman (bikini-clad one must assume) has been painted over with thick black paint. The recent scandal in which all women featured in an Ikea catalogue were digitally erased is part of this complex discourse.

Beneath the veneer of strict laws that seek to socially and physically separate men and women, Arthur equally represents a culture that creatively adapts to these laws. As the accompanying text explains, one photograph shows the digits of a phone number flashing in the window of a car. Whenever the male driver passes a car driven by a woman, the digits light up, encouraging total strangers to call the number and meet up. Behind the tall walls of private properties, Arthur is thus witness to parties and social gatherings were women wear Western-style clothes for a night out, dance and socialize with their friends from both genders. The colourful lights from a disco ball and the bare legs of a woman dancing stand in complete contrast to the mythical conception that these things do not exist in this culture.

Arthur’s role as photographer becomes that of an agent: switching between a medium format and a small format camera (depending on the accessibility of the subject), she frequents exclusive parties, girls’ bedrooms, social gatherings or private beaches. Inasmuch as Arthur reveals elements that would otherwise remain hidden, she is extremely careful in protecting people’s identities. While photographing sometimes-spontaneous reactions and perhaps revealing a little too much of a subject’s face, a number of photographs are actually re-photographed at a slight angle. Similar to Jorma Puranen’s series Shadows and Reflections, the light reflecting on the surface of the re-photographed print neatly disguises the female subject’s face. Yet here the subjects are not hidden or metaphorically painted over, but rather, their physical presence and their individualistic identify constitute the very subject of the photograph.

Terence Donovan Fashion, published by Art / Books and compiled and edited by his wife Diana and David Hillman, is an impressive tome dedicated to one of the most prolific fashion photographers of the second half of the

Helen Sear’s art isn’t easy to define. Certainly themes of nature, feminism and the landscape are prominent within her practice, but defining her oeuvre within these territories alone is highly inadequate. Her work is unpredictable yet exhibits unwavering intellectual   > Read More]]>  

Helen Sear’s art isn’t easy to define. Certainly themes of nature, feminism and the landscape are prominent within her practice, but defining her oeuvre within these territories alone is highly inadequate. Her work is unpredictable yet exhibits unwavering intellectual engagement with diverse subjects, ranging from contemporary developments in the field of neuroscience to obscure corners of art history.

The dozen lens-based projects that comprise Inside the View have been made over the past decade or so, most of which were conceived as prints for exhibitions, and some that document video screen and projection installations. The book title refers to two major bodies of work included here: Inside- (2004-8) and Beyond the View (2009-10). These are arguably two of Sear’s most visually luxurious works, and are an excellent example of her level of engagement with advanced technical processes. In these works, Sear layers different perspectives of views, and with a time-consuming digital (manual) process, picks out holes to form an intricate, lace-like patina across the ‘surface’ of the image. The female figure that emerges, with her back to the viewer, facing out and contemplating the landscape, makes an immediate reference to Casper David Friedrich’s ubiquitous romantic Wanderer…, although the obfuscation in Sear’s images, which demands the eye to render some visual order from this beautiful chaos, sets up for the viewer a challenging inquiry into the sublime.

Vision, and particularly the eye, is a recurring motif in Sear’s practice. In Spot (2003), the obliteration of the stuffed animals’ eyes is explicit, but with her suite of photographs that investigate a pond near her home in South Wales she draws a parallel to the eye and the camera obscura from the frozen surface of the muddy pond. In the valuable accompanying essay, David Chandler notes the significance of Sear working with photography from a fine art background; intensely curious about the mechanics, processes and paradox of the two-dimensional surface of the photographic image, yet not as anxious as perhaps some of her ‘photographer’-contemporaries have been. Elaborating the photographic process, often with decorative results despite a very ‘straight’ climate, remains, for Sear, a necessity.  

Chandler also establishes a vivid image of Sear’s childhood home and formative influences: a large Victorian house; stuffed animals; collections of unsettling medical photographs… dust and intrigue: “Looking up we see that the room is partly lined with shelves and on those shelves are arranged a collection of glass cabinets from which the lights glint too, casting mosaic patterns back into the room to confound our sense of space and the room’s velvet density.” To someone already familiar with Sear’s practice, reading these descriptions helped things click into place.

Design elements of the book reflect and package Sear’s work elegantly; the “mosaic patterns” overlaid in Display (2007) are echoed on the book’s cover, and are used to separate paragraphs in the essay. Also, the distinctive lace patina – a more literal motif of the feminine – present in Inside- and Beyond the View handsomely decorates the book’s endpapers. In some respects, the book functions as a cabinet of curiosities that would not be out of place in Sear’s family home: tactile, eclectic, intriguing, and dark in places.

Edited by the London based photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg, Seeing for Others brings together the work of 21 individuals studying photography at the Royal College of Art between 2011 and 2012. The concept for the book is at once   > Read More]]>  

Edited by the London based photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg, Seeing for Others brings together the work of 21 individuals studying photography at the Royal College of Art between 2011 and 2012. The concept for the book is at once simple yet also equally complex: the students were asked to anonymously write down their dreams, ‘real or invented’ as it says in the manual to the book. They selected a dream blindfolded, while this random selection would then become the starting point for a series of photographs produced in response to the dream. The two elements in the book, the original dream and the photographs derived from that dream, are each connected by a text written by the German philosopher Alexander García Düttmann. Via this quasi-social experiment, the book can be seen to uncover, through word and image, the latent meaning of dreamscapes.

The viewer will feel the urge to search for key passages mentioned in the dream: the dreamer’s father, a black cat, a sexual encounter and so forth. The interpretation of the dream is however rarely straightforward and these imaginary subjects remain unrepresented in the photographs. Rather, the students appeared to have interpreted the dream on a metaphorical and psychoanalytical level. In response to a dream about the opening of doors and entrances for instance, in Nebule I & II Theo Niderost photographed lusciously green fern growing in mist and fog. The photograph is devoid of any detail as the viewer tries to distinguish where and how the image was taken. This lack of clarity signifies the uncertainty of not knowing of what lies behind the imaginary doors of the original dream.

Another dream addresses the notion of feeling out of sync with the world. In the dream this impression is triggered by a bus driver who, unusually, accepts foreign currency. The photographic interpretation appears less concerned with the detail of the narrative of the dream, than it is with the lasting feeling the dream has evoked. To achieve this, Jolanta Dolewska photographed the barren concrete walls of what appears to be an industrial site. The walls are lit by a lamp, the wires of which precariously dangle from the ceiling. The harsh lines of the interior architecture are visually penetrated by the haphazard lighting system and the awkward wires attached to it. In this case, the out-of-syncness is evoked by the light, which, although not entirely out of place, does not completely ‘fit’ into its environment either.

Given that dreams are often strung together from multiple experiences and encounters, a number of students responded to the dream in the form of a collage or images layered upon each other. Here, in other words, the deconstructed and perhaps confusing narrative of the dream is in fact emphasised in the very format of representation. Considering that the dreamers are artists and photographers, it is perhaps unsurprising that many of the dreams are inherently visual. One student wrote his dream in the form of a mini screenplay which even included the type of cinematic shot (medium long shot, close up etc.) the dream was perceived in. This particular case vividly illustrates that the division between image and word is perhaps more blurry than might first be assumed. Here, the initial starting point for a visual interpretation is not as much based on words, but rather, it is based on words describing an imagined visual experience.

An essay at the end of the book, written by the head of the Royal College of Art Photography department Olivier Richon, adds a thought-provoking art historical and philosophical dimension to the project. As a result of the various visual and textual elements in the book, Seeing for Others can be read and looked at like a puzzle of the imagination – a puzzle that will never be fully completed yet the viewer is still absorbed in putting the different pieces together.

Created in voluminous amounts, self-published photobooks are everywhere. While some are dull and footling, a few are marvellously illuminating. The hit-and-miss qualities of photobooks may be an accurate reflection of the state of self-publishing in general: it’s under-edited, over-designed   > Read More]]>  

Created in voluminous amounts, self-published photobooks are everywhere. While some are dull and footling, a few are marvellously illuminating. The hit-and-miss qualities of photobooks may be an accurate reflection of the state of self-publishing in general: it’s under-edited, over-designed grandiloquence is a reaction to an oversaturated market; a place where too many photographers are competing for too little attention. The growing photobook trend may be problematic, but when one is finished wading through a riddle of inconsistencies, the feeling of satisfaction upon finding a great book is plenteous, exciting even.

Every so often, out of a torrent of vacuity, emerges a little gem: a book that actually means something, documents something real, morbid and fascinating, and offers instead of empty gesturing a substance to it that sticks its nails into one’s eye sockets. This is one of those books.

Index of Time is made with great consideration and care. Its grey, recycled cover and black type is well suited to its cavernous contents. Inside the fold out cover we find a map of Býčí skála cave, a 13-kilometre cave system in the Czech Republic, accompanied by a short text explaining what it is, how it has been explored and some of the artifacts and wall drawings it contains. A man named Wankel discovered the first parts of the cave system in 1872 and promptly romanticised his findings. Inside the cave he stumbled upon the tomb of a man whose skeleton was covered in jewels and a crown. Around him lay forty female skeletons, some beheaded and all ritually sacrificed. It would seem from the very beginning this cave was discovered to be fictionalised; its history and physical nature provide an apt setting for something, well, weird to happen.

The pictures themselves form a developing narrative of what Wankel might have seen in the cave. These high contrast black and white depictions of rock formations, crevices, cracks, chasms, fissures, interstices and openings are beautifully juxtaposed with telling yet functional objects such as a ladder with protruding water hose, a skull, a wood panel and a hollow ring. An axe and a knife are photographed in the style of Walker Evans’ Beauties of the Common Tool, assisted by Robert Frank and published in Fortune Magazine in 1955. All these objects seem to invite the viewer to make his or her own decision about their meanings or usage, but in some implied fashion, as we have seen with Tereza Zelenkova’s previous projects, the photographer doesn’t stray far from references to ritualism or occultism with this work either. The strength of this collaborative project is in the combining of Zelenkova’s own already now established aesthetic, with a technical proficiency and coherence not seen as acutely in previous projects.

However, in the middle of the photobook is a small risographically printed booklet containing three short stories. Although increasing in quality as one reads from section to section, these literary wanderings sit awkwardly with the photographs. The first story slumps into ironic Harry Potter-meets-The Famous Five in a “proto-Zen garden” territory, doing little to explicate the relative sincerity of the photographic project itself. The second story ‘Distance’ provides more of the same banality. Fortunately, the third tale of a cave-dwelling German Reich architect saves the gesture entirely. Titled ‘House of I’, the story opens with a first-person narrated battle with the senses: “My eyes have finally grown used to a life without daylight. Finally, after eleven months they have accepted their position in a new hierarchy of the senses. Ears, then eyes, then nose.” The rest of this text explores the psychological state of the architect as he nosedives from accepting the practicalities of cave living to an inner monologue of despairing solitude. “I was an architect, with a family. I can’t sleep. Have you lost your fucking mind?”

The book is now sold out but can be viewed here along with other projects by the photographers: terezazelenkova.com

The Leaf Peeper is a collaborative project between photographer Tim Bowditch and the writer Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau. Published by Rokov and produced by Push Print in the UK, it is a beautifully bound and printed limited edition book.   > Read More]]>  

The Leaf Peeper is a collaborative project between photographer Tim Bowditch and the writer Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau. Published by Rokov and produced by Push Print in the UK, it is a beautifully bound and printed limited edition book. The weight and texture of the paper matches the high quality of the photographic reproductions. This is the second publication by Rokov, who focus on collaborative projects between image-makers and writers. On the back of the ever-expanding market in self-published photobooks, this venture is a fine example how the production of limited edition books have increasingly improved in quality.

Bowditch’s photographs depict an elderly Japanese man taking pictures of an ancient Imperial site in Kyoto, the former capital of Japan. The man apparently engages in momijigari, or the act of hunting ‘red leaves’ in the autumn. In spite of what the title of the project suggests however, the man is as much concerned with the architecture of the Imperial site as he is with the changes in nature. The term ‘peeper’ better describes Bowditch’s activity as photographer, following the unknowing stranger taking photographs. Here, the photographer taking photographs of another photographer is a well-trodden format that can be read as a visual comment on Susan Sontag’s famous quote: ‘Photographs offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had.’ In his project, Bowditch alludes to a type of photography about photography, or meta-photography, that is not as much commenting on the subject (Kyoto, Imperial sites, ‘red leaves’ etc.), as it is commenting on man’s emotionally charged relationship with the subject via the photographic apparatus.

Even though Bowditch’s project offers itself to a variety of conceptually rich interpretations, the marriage between image and text is not convincing in this case. In an apparent exercise of free writing, the text is purposefully bewildering, confusing and only marginally related to the project. Apparently suffering from a hangover, the writer comments on everything from his clogged sinuses and cow’s milk to the meat in a kebab. Although this was quite likely a deliberate consideration, the text has the effect of distancing the viewer/reader from the subject of the photographs. Without the political dimensions of absurdity as exercised by Dadaists for instance, the text metaphorically becomes a hapless bystander to the images. The complex relationship between image and text has yet to be resolved.

The Present is the third in Paul Graham’s trilogy of projects on America beginning with American Night in 2003 and followed by A Shimmer of Possibility in 2007. While the previous projects focused on people who are socially and   > Read More]]>  

The Present is the third in Paul Graham’s trilogy of projects on America beginning with American Night in 2003 and followed by A Shimmer of Possibility in 2007. While the previous projects focused on people who are socially and economically on the margins of American society, in The Present Graham moves closer to a geographic centre, focusing on pedestrians on the streets of New York. Graham’s shift from impoverished urban dystopias to the very centre of finance functions as an uncanny reference to the global economic downturn and a crisis in Capitalism. The architecture of the city (much of it either built by or for the banking industry) functions as the ideal backdrop for Graham’s long-term project on representing social asymmetry and injustice.

Crucially, the photographs presented in the book are diptychs. Graham photographs the same scene twice, often from exactly the same angle, and only seconds apart, to create two images that are essentially in conversation with each other. While the city as backdrop remains the same, the flow of pedestrians and traffic subtly changes from image to image. In some cases the difference is emphasized by a new subject entering the image, while in others Graham simply shifts the focus of his camera to draw the viewer’s attention to another detail in the image. Here, Graham essentially creates a visual game as the viewer is invited to figure out how the images relate to each other. It is a very subtle, sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, but always a surprising connection that Graham presents the viewer with.

The amount of work involved producing these diptychs must not be underestimated. Working in the tradition of ‘street photography’, Graham does not come across unusual patterns of behaviour because of luck or by accident, but because he must have spent hours and hours searching for these patterns to emerge in the first place. Graham’s amazing feat is that he does not produce one visually compelling image, but, in fact, he produces two images that aren’t as much compelling as they are visually complex in relation to each other. A man blind in one eye juxtaposed with a man squinting against the bright sunshine. A businessman seemingly unmoved by his surroundings soaks up the sun while the world passes around him. Two cops apparently wish to check on a suspect backpack on the ground, while they actually seem more concerned with a tourist taking pictures (a reference to Graham’s very own position as photographer). 

One of the most surprising diptychs presents a smart business woman and a number of men, all seemingly strangers, walking on the sidewalk. In the next image, the woman lies on the ground and the strangers have gathered around her to help her up. A man’s open-palmed hand (a universal signifier for help) is dramatically lit by a ray of sunshine as the woman contemplates accepting the man’s help. The sheer beauty, the dramatic lighting and clarity of gestures adds a cinematic quality to this and many other photographs in the book. The clearly defined focus too, has helped to produce images that appear as if they were photographed on a movie set. As the final project in Graham’s trilogy on America, The Present concludes a totally new way of photographing, perceiving and understanding the urban environment as an ever-changing matrix of social interactions.

Love. Both one of the simplest and yet most complex emotions that exists. Necessary, elusive, all-consuming, painful, joyful, enigmatic. Can anyone explain or define this confounding human state? With suggested synonyms ranging from the lustful “passion”, through the loyal   > Read More]]>  

Love. Both one of the simplest and yet most complex emotions that exists. Necessary, elusive, all-consuming, painful, joyful, enigmatic. Can anyone explain or define this confounding human state? With suggested synonyms ranging from the lustful “passion”, through the loyal “devotion”, to the somewhat more moderate “affection”, “attachment” and “fondness”, dictionary definitions flounder in their attempts to capture a term used variously to describe a bond based on kinship, sexual desire, or admiration; an assurance thereof; the object thereof; the action thereof; the godly personification thereof, and beyond. Is it any wonder then, that, in 2004, artist EJ Major found herself struggling with the subject to such a degree that she decided to begin a mail art project whereby she would seek out the responses of randomly selected members of the public in an attempt to glean some insight into this universal phenomenon?

Major had long been interested in freezing frames from films and turning them into series of second-by-second stills. Having reached something of an impasse with regard to where to take this technique, Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 film Last Tango in Paris – one which she confesses both “bothers” and “seduces” her – gave her the inspiration to turn each of the 7,000+ screenshots into individual postcards. A controversial film, often condemned (and, accordingly, censored) for being more about sex and violence than love, Major defends it for its “determinedly anti-cliché” representation of what she, nevertheless, considers to be “predominantly romantic love.” It is comical then, and, of course, no mere coincidence, that, on the back of each of the postcards, Major should have chosen to write the archetypal cliché: “love is…” The rest was left blank, apart from a freepost return address. Each of these cards was then hand delivered around London and the West Midlands over the course of two years, accompanied by the following note:

Hello,

My name is E-J Major and I’m a practising artist.

This postcard has been hand-delivered to you as part of a self-funded project.

It is one of over 7,000 and forms part of an enquiry into love.

If you are able, would you return the postcard to me, no stamp is needed.

The postcard is left blank for your response, if you would like to make one.

With thanks,

E-J

Evoking the element of chance and input of “external artists” employed in the postal works of experimental Italian artist, Alighiero Boetti, in the 1970s, Major effectively handed over control of the outcome of her fledgling work. “[I] wanted to see the film as a series of stills each of which would have its own journey, only some of which would be returned.” In the end, Major received 449 cards back – a mere 6% of all those sent out, but still perhaps more than she had bargained with. The big question then was what to do with them all? And, after various different attempts, and spurred on by achieving a solo show at Matt Roberts Arts, as winner of the Salon Photo Prize 2011, here we are now with a beautifully linen-bound, embossed, hardback limited edition book, made possible by a crowd-funding campaign using the site Indiegogo.com. The book itself consists solely of the images of the cards – screenshot and response – telling a somewhat abridged version of the screenplay. An insert provides some background information about the project, but there is nothing within the binding itself. “I chose to leave out additional text mainly because this is an artists book. […] The voices at play are not those of writers or critics contextualising the project. […] I wanted the Limited Edition to feel more intimate.”

And, indeed, the responses are all very individual – some people have taken the time to complete the adage, some to comment on the project, some on the film. One appears to offer a shopping list for Thai curry, and another advises Major: “You need to get a life mate!” Presumably aware of the anonymity of their answers, many respondents were surprisingly candid. One, for example, confesses: “…a word I say to my husband a lot, when sometimes I mean something else.”

Many cards came back with just one word replies, some hopeful: “…everlasting,” “…oceanic,” “…infinite,” and some not: “…painful,” “…demanding.” Others suggest traumatic personal experience:  “…wondering if my natural mother thinks about me on my birthday…”, albeit often with humorous hindsight: “…a short term mental breakdown – losing control of reality!” There are more tangible references to loss, both of one’s partner or of oneself: “carrying on without them,” “…wanting to spend the rest of my days engaged in the cartography of your skin, your soul,” but, equally, also to simple pleasures such as: “…drinking pink champagne together in bed,” “…cuddles,” and “…sharing silence.” Some respondents devised extended metaphors or aphorisms: “…what endures when all other emotions fail,” “…what makes you know you are never alone,” and “…the closest feeling to heaven on earth,” whilst others were decidedly less romantic: “…bloody hard to find… got a map?” and “…not putting junk mail through people’s door!” Overall, there was also, Major confesses, “rather more God than I expected.” Not necessarily with religious intent, one card sums it up succinctly as “…the meaning of life.”

The question of the link between the response of the recipient and the image on the card remains in flux in this project. It is intriguing to question to what extent a subconscious influence may have been exerted, when viewing the two elements together. Certainly some of the more violent scenes appear to have come back with negative definitions; others have perhaps unawares repeated certain motifs, such as the respondent who drew a couple of pairs of magnets, uncannily reflecting the brickwork in the picture. As with many of Major’s works, the project presented in this book plays with the de- and re-contextualising of well-known images, and their association with thoughts and feelings, expressed through words. As Catherine Somzé writes in her short essay on Major:[1] “Decoding and writing (on) images, picturing meaning, and questioning our habits of perception – all these aspects of Major’s artistic endeavour point at the inscription to be read all through her work: that we are constructed in language.” Yet perhaps the point most keenly captured by the myriad of responses received on these screenshot cards is that some things – love being a prime example – are simply beyond our rationalisation and verbal expression: love is… more than words can say.

It remains, nevertheless, something of central concern to human existence, and something with which we grapple, consciously or not, for innumerable hours on our journey through life, whether this be for miserable days at a time, or for snatched and happy moments along the way. As I sat reading this book on the bus home from a long day at work, my mind began to wander through the story of the film and the individual scenes depicted, and to stray into the heads and lives of the respondents. For each single second’s shot, Major has collaged together multiple scenarios, and, each time a new reader comes along, further layers and interpretations are added, visually and verbally, as we contribute our own tuppence to the web. The images may depict captured moments in time, but the opportunities to continue the journey and expand the definitions offered are endless, and will differ every time you return. The book and project, like love itself, are an open-ended invitation for contemplation and remain, necessarily, undefined.

“I’m 40 years old now. Since my early photographs, more than 15 years ago, I have used myself as a model. .. I didn’t want [this book] to be ‘just the fourth monograph’. It’s important to juxtapose images of   > Read More]]>  

“I’m 40 years old now. Since my early photographs, more than 15 years ago, I have used myself as a model. .. I didn’t want [this book] to be ‘just the fourth monograph’. It’s important to juxtapose images of different times for comparison – investigating age, questioning what we are at a certain moment, where do I see myself now.”

This quotation from Elina Brotherus appears on the back cover of her new book and describes well its content and context. By mixing the series and playing with chronology, many visual threads become apparent: the pervasive sense of northern light, repeated use of the mirror, an ongoing dialogue with painting and art history alongside the artist’s consistent use of herself as subject. Brotherus has picked two writers Susan Bright and Timo Kelaranta, who have both known her and her work for a long time, to provide elucidatory essays in the book.

A strong seam of Brotherus’s work has been her very personal reflections on key events and moments in her life. Her exposure of her body allows us over time to see how she has changed and aged. But often her appearance is most radically altered due to the emotional condition she is in at the moment the photograph is taken. One recent body of work, which she almost left out of the book, was the Annunciation series. It makes one of the most powerful impacts across the book. This work shows her in a domestic space with objects that look like a pregnancy test kit and a mobile phone on hand. Yet the sad atmosphere conveyed by her expression and pose suggest loss, grief and longing. The title refers of course to the moment the Archangel Gabriel reveals to Mary that she is pregnant. Often in Renaissance paintings Mary is showered in a ray of glorious golden light. In contrast Brotherus’s pose suggests that no such miracle has occurred, in a work that speaks of unfulfilled desires and shattered hopes. It is a heart rending work to see and speaks of a real and emotional, personal experience while also tapping into art historical and religious iconography. 

This book feels in many ways like a real coming of age for the artist, whilst it reflects back it also suggests how much she has moved forward.  It shows a confidence that is impressive and feels like a significant summary not just for her as an artist but also in the history of contemporary photography. To be able to take on classic art historical subjects and genres and offer such a refreshing contemporary twist is no mean feat. Another example of this are her  Model Studies, which are an extension of the landscape studies of her earlier New Painting series, except that this time the artist inserts herself in the frame, often nude. Here she begins a strand continued elsewhere where she is simultaneously muse and artist. This is taken a step further in her 2009 Artist at Work series where she models for two male painters in a studio who study her, but who are also the subject of her own work in the photograph (1). The work questions representation more widely, confusing and conflating who is the subject, who is the artist and who is the ultimate author of the work.  

As a regular viewer of photography students’ work, I am always struck by how much Brotherus influences the next generation, and many will cite her. This seems to be because Brotherus grapples with many fundamental questions about what it is to be a contemporary photographer. Long may her personal and artistic journey continue and her willingness to share it all with us.

——————-

(1)  A video of this work in progress is worth a look on the artist’s website www.elinabrotherus.com

Work by Elina Brotherus is presently on view at ‘Out of Focus’ at Saatchi Gallery, London and she is represented in England by The Wapping Project, London.  

Alluding to a mock dictionary that the French surrealist Georges Bataille edited for the journal Documents, David Evans’ book Critical Dictionary is an eclectic, enlightening and at times humorous collection of images, essays, interviews and puns largely concerned   > Read More]]>  

Alluding to a mock dictionary that the French surrealist Georges Bataille edited for the journal Documents, David Evans’ book Critical Dictionary is an eclectic, enlightening and at times humorous collection of images, essays, interviews and puns largely concerned with the way photography and photographs can be conceptualized. Rather than editing information in the order of artists’ or authors’ names however, in the Critical Dictionary images and texts are ordered under a wide variety of umbrella terms ranging from ‘Algeria’ to ‘ZG’ (an independent journal which went into ‘hibernation’ in 1986). Like in Bataille’s project, Evans does not claim that the Critical Dictionary is in any way complete. Rather, by presenting the reader with an extremely subjective selection of about fifty words in total, Evans alludes to the fact that no dictionary is, or can be, complete. A dictionary is always a culturally specific and ideologically charged selection of information.

The artists and writers selected for the book, ranging from historic figures such as Ernst Jünger to contemporary artists such as Mark Bolland, tend to use photography as a means to articulate and express ideas. As a result, the majority of images presented in the book are politically charged, or, at the very least, evocative of a critical engagement with forms of representation. This should not suggest however that the selected photographs are somehow embedded in codes of representation that are too complex to decipher. In fact, the most simple concepts at times produce the most surprising results. Penelope Umbrico’s collection of photographs depicting sunsets she found on the image-sharing website Flickr reflects the universal desire to capture a natural phenomenon in all its glory. Umbrico’s collection of anonymously taken photographs is extremely homogenous, with the setting sun always in the centre of the photograph. At the same time differences in weather conditions, colour, and pixelation suggest that man’s ritualistic relationship with photography produces subtle variations beyond the homogeneity of the subject.

Another project that appears to comment on our complex relationship with the image is Paola Di Bello’s La Disparition. Here, the artist photographed maps of the Paris Metro displayed in or near Metro stations. Indicative of people trying to locate themselves on the maps with their index fingers, Di Bello’s photographic montage ingeniously reveals that the maps are unusually worn precisely at the spot where people believe they are located. The more frequently the Metro station is used, the more the location of the station on the map is worn. This rather tactile way of encountering an image (both the map and the photograph of the map) is noticeable in the Critical Dictionary as a whole: a number of photographs were scanned in such a way that the reproduction almost appears to hover on the page. An image accompanying the dictionary entry ‘Ghost Image’ purposefully appears three dimensional on the page.

Evans’ witty and often unsuspecting humour is best displayed in a number of interviews accompanying the book. For instance, Evans appears to take the contemporary artist Candice Breitz completely off guard with a peculiar discussion of whether she produces ‘films’ or ‘art’. Equally, contributions by the anonymous group Al Gebra hint at the fact that Evans’ nod to the surrealists inevitably also includes a good dosage of play. As such, the book covers a wide and diverse range of ‘dictionary’ terms, which also evoke a wide range of emotional responses with photography, the way it is produced, consumed and conceptualized, always at its centre. 

Nadav Kander’s Yangtze – The Long River is a photography book, the size and weight of which matches the magnitude of the subject matter. Photographed between 2006 and 2008, Kander travelled along China’s largest river in a period of   > Read More]]>  

Nadav Kander’s Yangtze – The Long River is a photography book, the size and weight of which matches the magnitude of the subject matter. Photographed between 2006 and 2008, Kander travelled along China’s largest river in a period of rapid transformation during the construction and completion of the Three Gorges Dam. The vast landscape photographs, too, highlight the sheer scale of a number of important tropes represented in the images: the size of the river, the millions of people living along the river, and the country’s unprecedented economic ambitions. Here, Kander’s large-format camera appears to focus on a powerful set of re-occurring themes: humongous construction projects literally towering over the landscape, men and women arrested by the rapid change around them, and bridges, many bridges, signifying the country’s leap from communism to a quasi-capitalist economic system.

Despite the apparent focus on the construction of large-scale building projects, at the centre of most photographs are people whose lives are intertwined with the river, people who work on the river, who live on the river, whose livelihood and well-being partially depends on the river. The river thus inevitably stands for much more than a natural phenomenon, but rather, it is the main artery for the allegorical body that is China. This notion of the river constituting part of a body is also emphasized in the four chapters of the book: ‘The Mouth’, ‘The Upstream’, ‘The Flooding’ and ‘The Upper Reaches’. From the hyper-modern cityscape of Shanghai, to the rural landscapes of Qinghai province, Kander documents a country that is steeped in ancient traditions yet equally re-invents itself at every bend. Precisely because of the many economic, social and political changes, Kander’s photographs are laden with the monumental task of capturing, if only briefly, an unstoppable transformation.

There is, in this metaphorically dense body of work, also an ideological dimension. The film ‘Still Life’ by Jia Zhangke highlights the fact that erecting ‘walls of stone’ upstream of the Yangtze has been a long-term vision of Mao Zedong himself. The construction and successful completion of the Three Gorges Dam is, in other words, the fulfillment of a dream that has long been an agenda for the Politburo. The taming of the river, the site of many floods and natural disasters, thus also fulfills an important ideological function as propaganda for the communist party. The muted colours and the omnipresence of an eerie fog in many of Kander’s photographs perhaps suggest that China’s future is, quite literally, submerged in the opaque politics of the country. Nevertheless, Kander’s photographs are nonjudgmental and unsentimental as they portray one vastly changing landscape after another.

The lasting impression left by looking at Kander’s photographs is that, ultimately, the landscapes that he depicted are about to be extinct. They give way to housing projects, highways, high-speed trains, and they give way to the demands of the economy and the party. The photographs thus fulfill a deeply sociological even archeological function in documenting a world that is fading as quickly as the water levels of the Three Gorges Dam are rising.

“In what might now have become a post-medium condition for art, photography is so often the medium of choice”.

Photography’s journey from discovery to dominance has been speedy, and this is what David Campany sets out to chart in   > Read More]]>  

“In what might now have become a post-medium condition for art, photography is so often the medium of choice”.

Photography’s journey from discovery to dominance has been speedy, and this is what David Campany sets out to chart in Art and Photography. The introductory essay “Survey” identifies central themes, tracing photography through conceptualism, Pop art and performance, moving onto street photography, “perhaps the only genre entirely specific to the medium”.

Photography has proven to be not only a flexible method of image-production, but also its subject. One of the first uses of photography was in knowledge creation, as a tool for documentation and memory. This institutional knowledge has been subverted by artists such as Carrie Mae Weems in her series of photographs of slaves, taken for their owners’ and buyers’ use. Archives created from groups of photos demonstrate how photographs and the information they seemingly possess are malleable concepts, subject to change through re-organisation and unexpected juxtapositions. 

Campany charts how photography began to be recognised through publications, museum shows and dedicated galleries during the second half of the 20^th century. Gradually the discussion of the role of photography moved away from the initial questions about whether photography will supplant painting – with Marcel Duchamp as photography’s early cheerleader – to an exchange between the two, as seen in the work of artists such as Gerhard Richter.

After the introductory essay, eight illustrated chapters focus on themes that characterise recent thinking in art history and the multiple functions of photography. The chapter “Memories and Archives” looks at how artists study the notion of the archival collection and investigate the production of knowledge with examples drawn from Andy Warhol’s photo booth strips to the archive created about an imaginary Hollywood actress by Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye. The following chapter “Objective Objects” discusses how photographs operate as definitions of things. The immediacy of an unfiltered, objective image brings up questions about the authenticity of photographs and whether anything can truly be recorded objectively. 

“Traces of Traces” looks at photography as a witness to an event or its aftermath. It functions differently in seemingly similar situations: Vito Acconci’s blurry photographs capture the moment his feet hit the ground after jumping in the air while all that remains of Carolee Schneemann’s performances are the photographs. Both series of images are of performance art but in the former, the camera is inherent in the act while in the latter the camera is an observer, a recorder. “The Urban and the Everyday” chapter focuses on how photography documents Western urban life, and this filters through other practices and knowledge, such as Cindy Bernard’s images of sites where feature films have been shot and Lee Friedlander’s unexpected street landscapes.

“The Studio Image” goes back to the birthplace of photographic practice. The formal qualities of the studio are echoed in Urs Lüthi’s self-portraits, more performance than portraiture. Traditional studio settings are subverted by Gregory Crewdson and James Casebere, who produce sets and models that are built for the purpose of photography only. The use of the studio as a subject becomes an encounter with the process and history of photography itself.

“The Arts of Reproduction” investigates the ways in which artists try to make sense of the visual world, or the ‘society of the spectacle’. From Chuck Close’s photorealism to Robert Heinecken’s anti-war collage and Andres Serrano’s confrontational Piss Christ, artists play on the visual knowledge we participate in by referencing well-known artworks, religious imagery and the language of advertising. They also investigate the hierarchies and methods of the visual ordering of the world, such as the museum storage photographed by Louise Lawler in Pictures That May or May Not Go Together.

“Just Looking” discusses the meanings of looking and seeing, with examples ranging from Victor Burgin’s panopticon-inspired work – with its contemporary echoes in our age of webcams and reality TV – to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seemingly blank cinema screen. The chapter “The Cultures of Nature” examines photography’s encounters with our relationship with nature, illustrated by Allan Sekula’s series of images of sea exports, and Stephen Shore’s Yosemite National Park where nature has been reduced to a leisure facility.

The scope of Art and Photography is ambitious, encompassing a range of themes and a large number of photographers, but the focus never wavers. In-depth and smoothly readable, it is also a good reference book with its artist biographies and a bibliography. The design has clarity and a sense of purpose, effortlessly managing to squeeze in an enormous amount of information.

Since we are now at a point where photography is almost completely interwoven into contemporary art practice, we must wonder what comes next. Although Art and Photography has been revised between 2003 and 2012, there isn’t much content relating to new technologies, and no recent artworks. If artists are using photography by default after rejecting other, traditional techniques, what will happen with the arrival of digital possibilities? Hopefully the sequel to this book has the answer.

Artist Book is Ori Gersht’s first personal project exploring the book as creative medium. It brings together images and texts relating to his latest film projects, Evaders (2009), Will you Dance for Me (2011) and Offering (2011). Artist Book  > Read More]]>  

Artist Book is Ori Gersht’s first personal project exploring the book as creative medium. It brings together images and texts relating to his latest film projects, Evaders (2009), Will you Dance for Me (2011) and Offering (2011). Artist Book is an intimate account of Gersht’s creative process, evidencing the multiple inspirations, meditations and references behind his films. From Titian, Velázquez and Rembrandt, through Russian cinema and the French Avant-garde, to contemporary filmmakers such as Béla Tarr and Jonathan Glazer, Gersht’s visual references create a particular narrative in the context of his books, combined with this own photographs, drawings and collages. The Artist Book case contains three separate publications, each referring to one of his films. Additionally, Gersht includes a booklet with a short essay by Robert Rowland Smith, which works as an instruction manual, a connecting thread to make the books work together as a single piece.

As an object, Artist Book has the same level of careful thought and impeccable production as all of Gersht’s works. In this sense the books separate themselves from the films they refer to, earning a place as independent pieces. For me, these books are not a printed adaptation of Gersht’s films, but a consideration of the thought process behind them. It is not often that one gets the opportunity to probe behind the surface of a work into an artist’s personal universe. I think the films are intended for projection, they entail an outward and communal approach. Conversely, these books suppose a personal and introspective connection to the images and themes in Gersht’s work. They offer one a glimpse into the complex world behind his quiet and sublime images and film sequences, allowing one to connect them with the history of art, photography and film.

For this project Gersht has been attentive to every detail, both in concept and production. Artist Book has been an opportunity to orchestrate the skills of many practitioners, working with writers, editors, book designers and printers. One can tell Gersht is aware of the fact the artist book stands as an art object in its own right, one which will surely be coveted by collectors. In consequence, Gersht’s Artist Book has two different versions, the original case in an edition of 1000, and a signed limited edition of 150 pieces; each in a special box accompanied by two signed prints.

The prints in the limited edition box originated from Gersht’s experience with producing this project. On one of his visits to the printers in Italy, he noticed some of the test runs had been printed twice on the same sheet of paper. This posed a double coincidence, both material and conceptual, between these hybrid images and the themes of memory, longing and ritual that lie at the core of his work. One of these images is a combination of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, and a film still from Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) which shows an orchestra playing at Auschwitz. Both the romantic wanderer from Friedrich’s painting and the orchestra from Resnais’ film gaze longingly at the void. From my point of view, this is the constant throughout the three films, a ritual of contemplation and assimilation of a tragedy, be it past or imminent.

At the heart of this book there is an angel, a ghost. Gersht describes it through Walter Benjamin’s words, when referring to the past as a fleeting image which disappears never to be seen again. The presence of Klee’s Angelus Novus and of Benjamin’s premonitory words echo along the pages of this book. Here, as in many of his works, Gersht attempts to summon ghosts that need appeasing.