The missing women of Ciudad Juarez as seen by Mayra Martell

Cinthia Jacobeth Castaneda Alvarado, 13 years old, disappeared October 24, 2008

It was my pleasure at the Kassel Photobook Festival, in the course of portfolio reviews to meet Mexican photographer Mayra Martell. Mayra showed me her project on the missing young women of Ciudad Juarez a Mexican border town across the Rio Grande from U.S. city of El Paso, Texas. All the reviewers were astounded and moved by this work and we unanimously nominated Mayra for the festival's Reviewer Award, a prize of 3,300 Euro.

Mayra's project to document the private spaces of the missing women from Ciudad Juarez is as much about memory as anything else. Her heartfelt images record the traces and painful reminders, all that's left for the many still grieving families.

Mayra says this about her project.

Utopia: If we take a step to obtain it, it moves away a step, if we take two steps, it moves away two steps; so concluding a utopia is used for walking.

On July 22 of 2003, the declaration of the president of Mexico's Human Rights National Committee, Jose Luis Soberanes, outraged the international press; he stated that the number of disappeared woman in Ciudad Juarez exceeded the thousands. To the date the number is still open, no political branch or organization knows exactly the number of disappeared woman.
Several doubts arose in me; on what moment did those woman became Fictitious? What happened to their families? With the spaces were they existed?
Such question became so constant; I ended up at the state's law enforcement station requesting information on the missing women. The murdered woman of Ciudad Juarez was not my interest, perhaps my concern, but not my main interest, only the disappearances. How is it possible that so many missing woman and in such that number are unaccounted for? My primary intention was to validate the disappearance of the woman, not of numbers. I wanted to see their rooms almost as an intuitive movement, as a past necessity.
The police reports don't give any information as to their families who try to continue with their lives. The living rooms remains intact, however these people are filled with images, religious images, their daughter images, hopeful images, and they do not know that to do with all of them. They search for the clothing that she wore a day before disappearing, it conserves her scent. After years, it is necessary the presence of another person to renew the memory. That is there were they are, it is there where they survive. They are still waiting.

Griselda Muroa Lopez, 16 years old, disappeared April 13th, 2009

Jazmin Chavarria Corrales, 21 years old, disappeared February 20th, 2007

Diana Noralay Piaga Reyna, 16 years old, disappeared February 27th, 2009

Maria Guadalupe Perez Montes, (Lupita), 17 years, disappeared January 31st, 2009

Chris Marker at Arles

Les Rencontres d'Arles is in full swing this week. One of the highlights will be a Chris Marker restrospective with more than 300 works produced between 1957 and 2010.

Marker became known internationally for the short film La jetée (1962). It tells of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel by using a series of filmed photographs developed as a photomontage of varying pace, with limited narration and sound effects. La Jetée was the inspiration for Mamoru Oshii's 1987 debut live action feature The Red Spectacles (and, later for, parts of Oshii's 2001 film Avalon as well) and also inspired Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995). It also inspired many of director Mira Nair's shots for the 2003 film The Namesake.

In 1982 Marker completed Sans Soleil, stretching the limits of what could be called a documentary. It is an essay, a montage, mixing pieces of documentary with fiction and philosophical comments, creating an atmosphere of dream and science fiction. The main themes are Japan, Africa, memory and travel. A sequence in the middle of the film takes place in San Francisco, and heavily references Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Beginning with Sans Soleil, he developed a deep interest in digital technology, which led to his film Level 5 (1996) and Immemory (1998, 2008), an interactive multimedia CD-ROM, produced for the Centre Pompidou (French language version) and from Exact Change (English version). Marker created a 19 minute multimedia piece in 2005 for The Museum of Modern Art in New York titled Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men which was influenced by T. S. Eliot's poem.

Chris Marker lives in Paris and very rarely grants interviews. When asked for a picture of himself, he usually offers a photograph of a cat instead. (Marker was represented in Agnes Varda's 2008 documentary "The Beaches of Agnes" by a cartoon drawing of a cat, speaking in a technologically altered voice.) Marker's own cat is named Guillaume-en-egypte.

In the 2007 Criterion Collection release of La Jetée and Sans Soleil, Marker included a short essay, "Working on a shoestring budget". He confessed to shooting all of Sans Soleil with a silent film camera and recording all the audio on a primitive audio cassette recorder. Marker also reminds the reader that only one short scene in La Jetée is of a moving image, as Marker could only borrow a movie camera for one afternoon while working on the film.

The photograph is from Chris Marker's Passengers series 2008 - 2010

See more here: http://www.rencontres-arles.com/A11/Home

Tokyo Girl inspires.....

My photograph Tokyo Girl No1 is part of the Real Art Roadshow,  two collections of New Zealand art that wheel their way to schools throughout the country. The two mobile art galleries unfold to form 80 square metre spaces and each display over 60 original artworks,  by far New Zealand’s biggest traveling art collection.

The school kids who see the works are encouraged to respond and here are two drawing made by 9 or 10 year olds after seeing Tokyo Girl.... wowww!!!

You can see more about Real Art Roadshow here: http://www.realartroadshow.co.nz/home.html

Photographers whose work I like - No14/ Thomas Schmidt

I first met Thomas Schmidt over dinner with our mutual friend Simon G. It was in Paris with hefty conversation, and a lake of Bordeaux. This May, back in Paris I went to see Thomas' show "Synthétique", at Galerie Lucile Corty.
The images spoke of all the things I look for in photography. Simple, understated images, loaded with quiet truths.

Thomas says this about his work, "It's the interstices I am interested in. Everything a photography gives up. It's the smallest things, details, the position of a hand, that empowers the singularity of an image. After all, a situation in itself has only the interest that people are willing to put into it. In this, it is about building images whose purpose is to reveal the void around them. Thus, a form of ellipsis, whose stylistic principle builds upon the commonly accepted notion of documentary. Something like the imagined part of photography."

On one gallery wall was an installation of Polaroid works. This image is quite wonderful.

And there were these, all photographs I wish I had made.

You can see more here: http://www.thomaschmidt.com/

DEVELOP Tube - a photographic video resource

Currently listing 325 different videos, DEVELOP Tube is an online educational resource which features interviews, profiles, lectures,  films about photojournalism, fine art, documentary photography and photographers. It's well worth a look.

Here are three videos that caught my eye:

Corinne Noordenbos, Head of the Department of Photography, Royal Academy of the Arts, The Hague, talks about Dutch Photography.

Nothing Is in the Place is an independent project by Newport lecturer, artist and curator Jason Evans, presenting a vision of the 1990s in Great Britain, created specially for the purposes of Photomonth in Kraków 2010.

Martin Parr talks about editing, reminding us that most of what we all shoot is crap. He's right of course.

You can see DEVELOP Tube here:
http://vimeo.com/channels/developphoto

There is also a DEVELOP tube for Youtube, with different content here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/DEVELOPPhoto

New playlists will be added to both over time....

Paris - Found

One of the pleasures of being in Paris in May and November is le marché d'antiquités or brocante that happens in Rue de Bretagne over a long weekend in both these months. The market is located in the Marais 5 minutes from where I stay.
The street and all the side streets are full of stalls selling every imaginable piece of junk and treasure. What I look for are the boxes of old photographs tossed out because of death, disinterest and the passage of time. Increasingly these photographs are becoming harder to find. Collectors are moving in and the prices are going up.
In fact just off Rue de Bretagne in Rue Charlot photographer and dealer Fabien Breuvart has a gallery space where he presents for sale mounted and matted "found" photographs. Fabien has an eye quality and the unusual and the prices are not at flea market levels.
Here are some photographs I unearthed, in fact was given by the dealer who it turned out knew my work and owned some of my books.

John Waters - Books and more

I found this slim but action packed book (AMMO Books) on the life and works of John Waters in Paris's wonderful remainder art book shop in the Marais, the shop I think is called Mona Lisa. Waters is famous for his, some would say tacky, movies like Female Trouble, Polyester and Hairspray. And a couple of years ago I'd seen a show of Waters plastic art at a NYC dealer gallery and had been blown away by his perception, humor and inventiveness, tacky too.
What I didn't know was that Waters is a book collector. In my new Waters book are some close-ups of his library. He's got books by: Ed Ruscha, Warhol (of course), Gerhard Richter, Luc Tymans, Fischli and Weiss, Martin Parr, Diane Arbus and on Japanese Photography, Contemporary German Photography.... and these are just a few of the photography books.

And for dedicated fans, John Waters will be presenting his one-man show This Filthy World at Auckland's Civic Theatre on Wednesday November 2.

New York - Roe Ethridge book signing

If you're in New York tonight, Wednesday June 28, Roe Ethridge will be signing his new book Le Luxe at Dashwood Books.  6-8 pm, 33 Bond Street between Bowery and Lafayette.

Roe Ethridge, self portrait (Polaroid), 2008

http://www.dashwoodbooks.com

Thomas Struth photographs the Queen and Duke in their first joint portrait

Thomas Struth doesn't usually make portraits he photographs architecture and in colossal scale. With this royal portrait Struth has said, he seeks to place the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh "both in their royal environment... and yet both in their own aura".
There is no pomp and circumstance here, no royal regalia as in Annie Leibowitz's recent photograph, although around them is the baroque splendor of Windsor Castle's Green Drawing Room. The Queen and Duke sit as comfortably as possible, but still rather stiffly. The beauty lies in the Queen's resplendent powder-blue dress and simple black shoes.
The light falls more fully on the Queen, and the Duke appears to fall back  into shadow.
They seem to be comfortably at home.

Thomas Struth, The Prado

Alec Soth - Rome commission 2011

As part of the 2011 edition of FOTOGRAFIA Festival Internazionale di Roma, Alec Soth has been commissioned to photograph The Eternal City.
Since 2003, previous photographers have included, Josef Koudelka (2003), Olivo Barbieri (2004), Anders Petersen (2005), Martin Parr (2006), Graciela Iturbide (2007), Gabriele Basilico ( 2008), Guy Tillim (2009) and Tod Papageorge (2010). All have been asked to portray the City of Rome with total freedom.

The image, from Alec Soth's Broken Manual

http://blog.fotografiafestival.it/

Auckland - SURFACE, photographs from Becky Nunes and Jan Young

It was a pleasure to return to Auckland and see Becky Nunes and Jan Young's collaborative show SURFACE at NKB Gallery in Auckland's Mt Eden. It came as no surprise to find a knock-out, cohesive show with images that would not be out of place in one of Paris's better dealer galleries.
Both sets of work compliment each other and the works by these two photographers are able to coexist in one room because the artists share a basic project, and find disparate means to depict the impermanence of the subjects they are freezing in time. And each in their own way are dealing with the business of seeing, seeing beyond the obvious and a search for the hidden and something inside ourselves. I liked how the works were simple, yet loaded with possibilities. Profound. Authentic. I left the gallery thinking I have to go and photograph NOW, always a sign that what I've just seen has confirmed the power of a medium which so often is dull, repetitive and just plain bad.

Here are some images:

Becky Nunes

Jan Young

www.beckynunes.co.nz
www.janyoung.co.nz

Paris - in May, first photographs

Here is a preliminary set of photographs from my time in Paris this last May.....

Roe Ethridge - Le Luxe

I saw this book in Kassel at the photobook festival. Strange, bewildering, difficult, enigmatic, mystifying, in fact all over the place. Everything a great photobook should be. Highly recommended.

Mack books say this:

American artist Roe Ethridge's latest book takes its title from the French "C'est pas du luxe", an ironic phrase which alludes to the superfluous nature of luxury whilst proclaiming how essential it is to existence. Such paradoxes are fluently woven through Ethridge's oeuvre and Le Luxe encompasses his practice from the past decade, without ever slipping into the moribund gravitas of a retrospective.
Plumbing his diverse image inventories, from personal images and magazine commissions to an archive of online screen shots, the book continues his exploration of picture-making that disavows the potential for creating a finished work. Ethridge para-phrases Eggleston when he states that he is "at war with the finished" in an era of digital photography straining towards idealisation. The pristine conditions of photography are undermined in the book's design and riff on Henri Matisse's apposite aphorism "exactitude is not truth" (Matisse titled two of his paintings Le Luxe).
Composed in three parts, Le Luxe contains an unusual backdrop, the everyday of the artist, who worked from November 2005 to January 2010 on one commission documenting a building in downtown Manhattan on a site adjacent to the World Trade Centre. This narrative offers an uneasy balance to the fissures between analogue and digital and Ethridge's consistent undermining of his own certainties.
Roe Ethridge was born in 1969 in Miami and received a BFA in Photography at The College of Art in Atlanta, GA. Ethridge's images emanate from his direct experience of the world. His focus is multiple and restless as he works to capture the vivid and intimate details of his various locales. In doing so, he moves freely among the classic genres of the photographic medium - portrait, landscape, and still life.

http://www.mackbooks.co.uk/pages/leluxe/

NAN GOLDIN, when asked, "Is a photographer an artist?"

Then

"No, anybody can take a picture. Now, you don't even have to be a person, you can be a telephone. There were always too many pictures in the world and today there are billions of pictures. Photography has become less and less real, and my whole motivation is gone, wiped. I became a photographer to make a record that no one could revise, and now anyone can revise it. I gave a talk at the Tate a couple of years ago, and I asked an audience of 200 people how many of them believed that photography was still a true statement. Five people raised their hands."

Now

John Gossage on ONE DAY

When I asked John Gossage if he'd made any photographs on ONE DAY a year after, he said "No, but I do remember Kassel." Here's a picture he sent me.....

Nice....