Rome - Time passing

I can think of no other place where the sense of time past and time passing is so evident. In the streets, in the trees, in the landscape. In the air. Time is on my mind when in Rome.

Rome - polarities

Rome, a city of incredible extremes. Polarities that make this place so special. So profound. The ancient and the modern, the sacred and profane, substance and trivia, the real and unreal. To illustrate, here are three confessionals and a green shed with old stump.

Polish people (are wonderful!)

The wonderful Poles....charming, friendly, delightful, smiling and hospitable. Here are three people I photographed; a guy at the train station, a young woman from Warsaw in Lodz to see the festival, and a gentleman whom I took to be the mayor of a little town outside of Lodz where photography students were showing work in an abandoned prison.

Polish style

My May European travels took me to Poland, mostly in Lodz for the Photography Festival -http://www.fotofestiwal.com/2008/ and with a few days in Krakow with time to take in their month of photography - http://www.photomonth.com.
Although today very much a part of greater Europe there seems to be evident a particular sense of Polish style, a particular visual look in their design. A sort of modernist thing it seemed to me. Here are two photographs that have that look.

A Short History of Photography - Launch in Auckland

Next Tuesday night June 10th between 5 - 7pm at John Leech Gallery in Auckland I will launch my latest book A Short History of Photography.This is published in New Zealand by Random House as a co-edition with my British publisher Dewi Lewis. Gerry Badger, British photography critic and writer in his introductory essay writes: "While looking through his contact sheets, Harvey Benge noticed that one of his pictures reminded him of a 'Friedlander', another someone else. All photographers do this, and if the photograph in question apes another photographer too closely, it's usually a cause for rejection. But Benge did the opposite. Picking out his 'Friedlander' and his 'Parr' and his 'Baltz' he decided to make an 'anthology' of contemporary photography featuring some of its biggest names. Yet they are all genuine, original Benges. They are also all good pictures, not mere pastiches of the 'originals' of which they gently but insistently remind one. This may be a game, but games can be very serious, and this fascinating book is both a serious and light-hearted exploration of photographic style."

Satellite Gallery - They Were Young Once

In the company of Bruce Connew, Marti Friedlander and Gil Hanly I will show at the Satellite gallery in Auckland, this image,
BL Medici, made in 2003. The show opens on Tuesday June 3. Also opening same night is a group show at The John Leech Gallery where I will show images from my new book A Short History of Photography. Work from this book is also showing in Paris at SPREE, 16 rue la vieuville in the 18th.

Paris - Small Anarchies

Back from Paris, just. Here are some preliminary images from random wanderings in the street. No real idea in mind. Chance and circumstance. Looking through what I shot, Paris life seems to have taken on a sub human quality, where humanity, has become secondary to the constructed, the ephemeral, the unreal. A Baudrillard simulacrum, where the hyperreal has become truth in its own right. There are many readings, many pictures and many edits too. What to make of this?

Paris / Lodz / Rome

Next week I leave for Paris where I will show my Short History of Photography work at galerie SPREE. After to Lodz, the second largest city in Poland where I will show my China Story pictures. These are a series I made in 2006 and 2007 when I was a guest at the Pingyao Festival in Shanxi Province China. The International Festival of Photography in Lodz is the biggest event of this kind in Poland. It is organized by Foundation of Visual Education and Lodz Art Center, located in a complex of 19th century factories. Every year in May over 50 exhibitions are presented. There will be shows of contemporary Chinese photography plus a 'Western Eye on the East' which includes my work and among others, shows from friends Nadav Kander (London) and Wolfgang Zurbon (Cologne). After to Rome where I will catch FotoGrafia International. Here is a picture I made in Shanghai in 2006.

Marks of Honour 2008 - 14 contemporary photographers pay homage

Photography in books has not only influenced collectors and curators, but also generations of photographers. Since Robert Frank published his Les Américains in 1958, the photobook is a source for artistic inspiration and creative reference.
Marks of Honour was initiated by Markus Schaden (Schaden.com photobookshop, Cologne) and Willem van Zoetendaal (Van Zoetendaal Gallery, Amsterdam) in 2005.
Then, 41 photographers paid a homage to a publication which was influential to their own work. These editions were exhibited at Van Zoetendaal Gallery and FOAM, Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam.
Now in 2008, the basic concept remains the same. MoH/08 is curated and organized In Cologne by Nina Poppe and Verena Loewenhaupt. Fourteen contemporary photographers have been invited to create a homage to a photo-book that has influenced their own practice. All participating works (limited to three copies), will contain the original photobook and its complimentary homage. Exhibitions and a significant catalogue will follow.
Included among the fourteen are: Antoine D‘Agata, Peter Granser, Mark Power, Alec Soth, and Jules Spinatsch. My entry will be a homage to William Eggleston's Guide published in 1976 by The Museum of Modern Art as a catalogue to Eggleston's ground-breaking exhibition. My contribution consists of an artist's book of 16 pages, with hand written text and four tipped in photographs, one inserted loose. Both books contained in a cloth bound slip-case.
You can read more at: http://www.marksofhonour.com/

Auckland - Dawn Parade

ANZAC day, Dawn Parade at the Auckland Museum. A Beautiful sunrise. A time to remember. Lest We Forget.

Auckland - the importance of what's left out

Here is another Auckland picture I made yesterday. To me it's a good example of a picture working by virtue of what's not in it rather than what is. I like the grassy green negative space and the feeling that something is going to happen soon. Something, somebody is about to intrude. But what? Who? I'm sure there are other readings, but this is mine.....

Auckland and two Hollywoods

Sunday, making pictures on this clear sunny very much autumn day. At Avondale to the old Hollywood Cinema famous for its regular screenings (complete with rice throwing) of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. And of course for it's wonderful old Wurlitzer organ. Today The Wurlizter Organ Trust had gathered for a performance. To quote from the program "great music and laughter guaranteed ...includes some short slap-stick silent movie comedies..." I arrived just as the happy audience was spilling out and made this picture of an elegant Wurlitzer fan and her Marilyn bag... key in hand she seemed ready for anything. Later in a pile of abandoned junk I found this single Hollywood shoe, sad and lonely, nothing like the other face of Hollywood that I'd just left.....

Auckland and Albert Einstein

The most wonderful thing we can experience is the sense of mystery. It is the source of all true art and science. Whosoever has never felt this emotion, who no longer knows how to stop and meditate and remain transfixed in fearful admiration, is like a dead man: his eyes are shut. Albert Einstein.

Images made Saturday April 5

Auckland? Or is it?

Here is a picture I made last night of a gas station. Located in a busy main road that's lined with thriving and buzzing ethnic restaurants (mostly Chinese) the station could be anywhere. Unlike the restaurants the station is empty, soulless and corporate. The only New Zealand give-aways are perhaps the two very local looking buildings over the wall... but they could be anywhere too .....

Auckland - strange differences

My verbal attempt to explain and describe Auckland's strange differences to an American photographer friend failed me.
These pictures (which I made last evening on a walk from my house) perhaps speak better about this city. I see in them impermanence, change, emptiness, and time passing.

PLUS BRITNEY - Life Goes On

Here is a wonderful pink rubber glove I recently discovered in Auckland's Grey Lynn shopping area. What gets to me
most is the almost unnoticeable line of text on one of the magazine covers - PLUS BRITNEY. The owner of hand and
glove seems unperturbed, evidence that life does go on, with or without Britney.

Harvey Benge at Zendai MoMA Shanghai

Here is an installation picture of my work Sixty Portraits that is currently showing with MoMA Shanghai's Art and Life 366 programme. The work has been installed in a public location and is part of the museums year long strategy to bring art out of the museum into the public arena. The sixty photographs in this series were made between 2001 and 2007 in France (Paris), New Zealand (Northcote), and China (Pingyao). The images were shot in an intentionally deadpan, uncontrived and democratic fashion. Randomly sequenced, the viewer is left to look for clues as to location and identity. The works purpose is to raise issues of race, multiculturalism and globalisation. The series will also be one of several projection works shown at the opening of the Auckland Photography Festival on May 30.

Think of a tree.....

Nothing has any inherent existence of its own when you really look at it. This absence of independent existence is what can be called “emptiness.” When you think of a tree, one tends to think of a distinctly defined object; and on a certain level it is. But when you look more closely at the tree, you will see that ultimately it has no independent existence. When you contemplate it, you will find that it dissolves into an extremely subtle net of relationships. The rain that falls on its leaves, the wind that sways it, the soil that nourishes and sustains it, all the seasons and the weather, moonlight and starlight and sunlight—all form part of this tree. And too, the particular individual view that each person has when they look at the tree.
As you begin to think more about the tree, you will discover that everything in the universe helps to make the tree what it is; that it cannot at any moment be isolated from anything else; and that at every moment its nature is subtly changing.
This particular tree is in Cologne at the back of the Cologne Cathedral. Somehow despite the importance and wonder of the cathedral this tree seemed to overpower even that. Think about it.....

Back in Paris.....

Here are some pictures I made in Paris last November. Working there this time with no particular idea in mind, but starting to think of Eggleston. In his book The Democratic Forest (1989) Eggleston writes, "I walked into the dead leaves off the road..... there was no picture there. It seemed like nothing, but of course there was something for someone out there. I started forcing myself to take pictures of the earth. There were a few weeds. I began to realise that soon I was taking some pretty good pictures.." Later someone asked Eggleston what he'd been photographing that day. "Well, I've been photographing democratically. " he replied. I like that idea.....

Two more Auckland landscapes

These pictures were made last night in the Auckland suburb of Mt Albert, 10 minutes drive from downtown Auckland and once solidly white and middle class. I lived here in my teens and went to school at Mt Albert Grammar. Today the changes are remarkable. They surprised me. The shopping centre looks tired and old. Many of the shops are now Chinese restaurants of the sort you can find in the back streets of any Asian city. The railway line runs down the back of the shops where any attempt at maintenance seems to have been long abandoned. Yet there is life in the street. The faces (mostly Asian) are bright, young and hopeful.

What?

My belief is that photographs fall into two possible categories. The "what the" pictures that demand further enquiry and generally have an element of mystery or enigma. And then the others that I call "so what" pictures. These demand no response from the viewer who is unmoved and left yawning. This picture- two fresh chicks - in my opinion is a low level "what the" picture. What is going on here?. You can check that out by wandering through the Birkenhead shops in Auckland where the picture was made on Wednesday night. (I like the little red arrow sneaking into frame top left.)

Auckland City - a landscape

Here is a landscape picture, just to show that I do make them.....Auckland City from Birkenhead 8.30pm, Wednesday January 2nd.
The city lights are starting to come on and you can see the Sky Tower and a flash of the harbour which lies between the dark trees in the foreground and the city in the distance. Clouds hover as they so often do.

Christmas Past......

The remnants of Christmas, tired and abandoned await their fate. The flower arrangement drooping sadly, the Christmas tree star, leaning and no longer pointing heaven-ward and the cheap and useless Christmas crackers goodies (fun for a moment) looking more like junk than at the moment they burst from their crackers. Anyway, something to photograph....

New Year / New Work

Starting to make pictures in Auckland, of the city, the first for a long time. Trying to find new ways of seeing. Looking at the dark and the light. Here are the first....but not the last!

Number 3 - Another great workshop at AUT

Sunday night and the weekend workshop at AUT has finished. I worked alongside Andre Lutzen from Hamburg and we spent the weekend with a small but perfectly formed group of talented individuals. It was a pleasure to meet Andre and see his edgy work and discover that we have so many friends internationally in common. Photography is indeed a very small world. Here is a picture of Andre (on the left), Leonhard Emmerling, Direcor of St Paul Street Gallery (on the right) and me in the middle.

St Paul Street Gallery opening Saturday December 15

I will show my CHINA STORY pictures at St Paul Street......along with Andre Lutzens Congo work. Leonhard Emmerling at St Paul Street Gallery writes, "Hamburg based photographer Andre Luetzen and Auckland based photographer Harvey Benge show new works. Harvey Benge shows CHINA STORY, images from his last voyage to China.
Andre Luetzen shows HEART OF DARKNESS, images from a trip on the River Congo in search of information about the mineral Coltan. The photographic essay is loosely based on Joseph Conrad's novel "Heart of Darkness" and explores the questions, whether something has changed since the era of colonization in the time of globalization.
Harvey and Andre will give a workshop on Saturday and Sunday, December 15 and 16 at St Paul Street Auckland.

Antidote to the city and northern winter

Auckland, Sunday morning. Drive to KareKare on the west coast 40 minutes from my house. This beach made famous for the location of the the film The Piano. Walking south around the headland to the brooding wetlands. No people, just the black sands, ancient cliffs and the boiling sea. Nothing could be further from concrete, steel and traffic, not to mention paralytic transport strikes on wet Parisian winter mornings. Sheltered under a tumbling rocky cliff face is this primaeval pool of dark water, home for generations of fallen pohutakawa trees, their branches locked in some death dance. Am I home?