get the picture.....

... is a photographers collective based in Paris, so far with six members. My connection to get the picture came about via facebook and one of the collective's members Simon Kossoff. Simon is originally from Brighton England, but now lives in Kansas City.
My introduction to Simon came through a mutual friend Marcus Haydock, a very fine and perceptive photographer whom I met some years ago when I gave a talk at Brighton University. I have always said the world of photography is really small. So here is proof.

In Paris this November I met gtp member Damien Lafargue and
was royally entertained at his home over dinner. As I live and work for much of the time in Auckland it is easy to feel isolated and disenfranchised. It therefore comes as a great pleasure to meet these photographers who not only are pleasant and generous individuals but also share a photographic vision.

Here are some pictures from Simon Kossoff. I think you will see why there is a connection......

Paris in November - new pictures

Am working on a new (yet to be titled, well ok I'm not telling here) book project with photographs made in Paris and London this last November. Am trying to make the pictures as visually simple as possible but with maximum potential to extract a narrative. Here are five pictures. The world is a strange place when you really start to look.....

Paris / London picture edit.... first look

....here are some first runs over the target, pictures I'll look at again and might use, might not..... these ones from London.

I came across these thoughts from Gabriel Orozco, good to have in the mind's eye while editing.

......Orozco pays meticulous attention to what he calls the "liquidity of things" as seen in mundane and evanescent objects and elements of everyday life- the momentary fog on a polished piano top, a deflated football, tins of cat food balanced on watermelons, light through leaves, the screech of a tire, chess pieces on a chessboard. "People forget that I want to disappoint," he has said. "I use that word deliberately. I want to disappoint the expectations of the one who waits to be amazed. When you make a decision someone is going to be disappointed because they think they know you. It is only then that the poetic can happen."

Paris Photo - after thoughts

Although not having a fix on gallery sales figures there seemed little evidence that the World's Economic Woes had any impact on Paris Photo 2009. Attendance was up from 37,760 last year to 40,150 this, clearly evident from the long lines waiting to get tickets.
For me Paris Photo is about catching-up with friends, renewing contacts and making new ones, and of course photobooks, (Schaden alone had 30 book signings!) which doesn't leave a lot of time for close inspection of the work on the walls. Having said this, one couldn't help but notice the over-hyped, make it large, wow I'm an "artist" work that stood out largely due to its lack of authenticity and appalling lack of substance. For me it's hard to go past an Atget or a Kertesz and they were there too.

It was great to meet delightful people whose work I admire, photographers Rob Hornstra, Andrew Phelps, with his new book NOT NIIGATA, Jessica Backhaus, with her publisher Klaus Kehrer, and her galerist Robert Morat from Hamburg, at Paris Photo for the first time and with one of the better showings. Great to catch-up with John Gossage and swap my SMALL ANARCHIES for his A FEW YEARS WITH A TELECASTER, this a knock-out small but perfectly formed book in an edition of only 50 copies. Good to see Antoine d'Agata, in Paris briefly before going back to Cambodia. Peter Bialobrzeski with a new book CASE STUDY HOMES. Martin Parr with his book LUXURY. Gerry Badger as laconic as ever. Peter Fraser over from London. Christoph Schifferli in from Zürich. And Jim and Millie Casper from Lens Culture and their out-there Paris Photo party.

Subversive Fabien Breuvart was true to form when on opening night he dumped a truck load of "found photographs" at the Carousel du Louvre entry. I managed to grab a few small gems as a bunch of us headed off for the usual opening night dinner.... You can take a look here: http://www.vimeo.com/7722895

If you are involved in photography Paris Photo offers something for everybody. For me it reminds me just how small the photo universe is and that everybody knows everybody. And if you go along with Woody Allen's dictum that "90% of life is showing up" making the arduous trip from Auckland to Paris just for Paris Photo is well worth the effort. Surprising things can happen and they did! More about that later.......

here are a couple of pictures that get across a little of the PP flavor.....

Hello Auckland Goodbye Paris

Three weeks in Paris never went so fast! Back to a mountain of emails, picture editing and projects to climb into. Not to mention blog entries. Paris Photo special as a place to catch up with friends and float new ideas. So much to do now..... here is a self-picture of Shelley and me, just for the record and to prove that we were there.....

Goodbye Auckland Hello Paris

I leave Auckland today for Paris, to hang-out, see friends, look at some art, make pictures and go to PARIS PHOTO next week. As I'm going to be preoccupied with all of that it's unlikely there will be any blog postings in the next three weeks. If you happen to be in Paris it's possible that I can be found in my "office", Le Fumoir at 6, Rue de l'Amiral de Coligny in the 1st. It's just off the rue de Rivoli facing the east end of the Louvre. A good time for me is around 4 in the afternoon..... I'm back in Auckland December 1st.

Auckland - taking a CANON PowerShot G11 for a walk

Kindly arranged by Tim Grey at Photographer's Mail CANON NZ have given me a CANON PowerShot G11 to take and try out in Paris next week. Here are some pictures I made on a quick walk up Ponsonby Road this morning. So far I'm really pleased with the results. On program the camera seems idiot proof and delivers sharp well exposed pictures and shooting RAW the image size is 28.6M, big enough to make a 61 x 46cm print at 150 pixels / inch. Another plus is the image format which is 6 x 4.5 a shape I much prefer to standard 35mm. The camera has a sturdy professional feel and yet fits in the pocket..... here are four pictures....

The La Brea Matrix

A project by Schaden.com, Cologne and The Lapis Press, Culver City LA

The Picture
La Brea made photographic history. With the help of German photo-grapher Bernd Becher, the photograph was shown at documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany, as early as 1977. It was also printed in Sally Eauclaire‘s survey The New Color Photography, which was published in 1981 and which helped American color photography achieve its international break-through. The following year, La Brea appeared in Shore‘s photobook Uncommon Places. Thereafter, the photograph began exerting a long-terminfluence as a result, among other things, of Becher‘s work as a teacher at the art academy in Düsseldorf. Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky and other renowned art photographers of the Becher school have all acknowledged the influence of Stephen Shore.

Throughout the world, La Brea has been included in textbooks and surveys of photography. It has become part of the canon and of the collective memory of photography. Christy Lange recently analyzed the deep impact the picture has had even on younger photographers. “In 1975, he photographed an intersection in Los Angeles that I know well, at the corner of Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue. Though he took his picture two years before I was born, and none of the stores that appear in it remain today, it is still immediately recognizable to me. This is partly because everything in the photograph, from the stray hose in the immediate foreground to the ‘Walk’ signal in the middle ground, to the houses on the hillside (one of them my parents’ home), are in equal sharp focus.” Christy Lange is not alone in believing that La Brea marks a new concept of landscape imagery, “one in which the details themselves – their density and abundance, rather than the entirety – were intended to be the focal point or subject. Each image is so sharp...” If we are to follow in Stephen Shore‘s footsteps, then we must make photography more complex, see it clearly, and rethink it.

“If I saw something interesting, I didn’t have to make a picture about it. I could let it be somewhere in the picture – it’s not like pointing at something and saying, “Take a look at this”. It’s saying “Take a look at this object I am making.” It’s asking you to savor not something in the world, but to savor the image itself.”

The Project
La Brea, Stephen Shore‘s key photograph of 1975, constitutes the conceptual core of the La Brea Matrix Project. Six art photographers from Germany have accepted an invitation to Los Angeles as part of an artist-in-residence program in 2009 and 2010 to search for photographic points of reference to this iconic picture.
These photographers are
Jens Liebchen (Berlin, born in 1970)
Max Regenberg (Cologne, born in 1951)
Oliver Sieber (Düsseldorf, born in 1966)
Olaf Unverzart (Munich, born in 1972)
Robert Voit (Munich, born in 1969) and
Janko Woltersmann (Hanover, born in 1967).
In their previous work, these eminent photographers have reflected on American New Color photography in extremely different ways.

The goal of the La Brea Matrix Project is by no means just to pay homage to Stephen Shore or to search for traces of his work. A conscious decision has been made to leave the criteria of this project open. The photographers can thus choose to focus, for example, on iconography, semiotics, form, aesthetics and reception history. The project will be implemented in three phases. First, a limited pre-edition will bring together a selection of pre-viously taken photographs that display a reference to Shore‘s seminal work. Second, the photographs taken in Los Angeles will then be presentedin a separate edition. Third, an exhibition and books on the La Brea MatrixProject will be realized.

The La Brea Matrix is a project of Schaden.com, Cologne and The Lapis Press, Culver City.

More at: http://www.labreamatrix.com

Richard Prince - on the Photobook

From the catalogue to Richard Prince's 2008 show Continuation, at the Serpentine Gallery, London, Prince has this to say about the photobook.

".... Ruscha, Kippenberger, and Christopher Wool are my main focus. I also have complete runs of Larry Clark, Araki, Robert Frank. A lot of photography books are coveted. Artists' books are just starting to take off. Books by artists like Dieter Roth, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Ray Johnson, Ruscha, Kippenberger, Wool, are inseparable from their work. Perhaps a better description is an "extension". A lot of photography books are where the work ultimately exists. There's a kind of photography show I'd like to curate: Roe Etheridge, Peter Sutherland, Ed Templeton, Terry Richardson, Juergen Teller, Collier Schorr... But I'm not sure you need to see 11 x 14 prints of Robert Frank's Americans on the wall."

Better "What the Fuck" than "So What"

John Baldessari says he's interested in "fucking people up" when they look at his work. He also talks about "no more boring art". I like both these statements. It's one thing going along with these sentiments, and another making work that follows... It's a question of avoiding the predictable and the seen it all before. Easier said than done....

Here are some diptychs I made a couple of years ago, and have done nothing with. They are constructed from some late 60's found Kodachromes and some of my own pictures. Diptychs are dangerous territory as potentially one picture can cannibalize the other and the sum of the parts ends up less than the potency of the individual image. I hope I haven't fallen into that trap!

Working from the position that each picture contains a mini-narrative, I've combined images that seem on one level illogical together. What better way to "fuck people up" and and make the reader work harder. Better "What the fuck" than "So what".

Recreating the Berlin Wall

The idea is to create on the 9th November 2009, a line of people that will recreate the Berlin Wall with their physical presence, that would last for approximately 30 minutes.
The Berlin Wall project is about creating a " temporary monument of reflection". For the 20 year anniversary the Berlin Wall will be rebuilt, not from steel and concrete but with people.. to remember when Berlin became one again...

47,000 people are forming a human chain that will make its way on the 9th November (around 8.15pm) a chain exactly where the originally wall stood. This will create space for thinking together about separation and reunion... and show how a single person can move as part of a group.

Rather than being a twenty year memorial of the walls fall, its is much more about the scale of the human imagination, achievement and involvement, and it that could be used for the positive rather than the negative actions.. and is a project that can attract people from all different walks of life, age, profession, and class.

The wall when it was created was one of the clearest man-made divisions of people with different ideologies.
With mauer mob 09 project, the creation of the wall by people is more about saying that such divisions are no longer acceptable in todays society.. Its much more a rebellious statement of "borders were yesterday", than remembering the actual wall.

To join in this amazing event you can contact via facebook: Mauer Mob. 2009 - Recreating the Berlin Wall"