Chris Marker 1921 - 2012

Chris Marker, one of the grand eccentrics of world cinema, died last Sunday on his 91st birthday. Born Christian Francois Bouche-Velleneuve on 29 July 1921, Marker was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La jetée (1962), A Grin Without a Cat (1977), Sans Soleil (1983) and AK (1985), an essay film on the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Marker is often associated with the Left Bank Cinema movement that occurred in the late 1950s and included such other filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Henri Colpi and Armand Gatti. His friend and sometime collaborator Alain Resnais has called him "the prototype of the twenty-first-century man." Film theorist Roy Armes has said of him: "Marker is unclassifiable because he is unique...The French Cinema has its dramatists and its poets, its technicians, and its autobiographers, but only has one true essayist: Chris Marker."

Paul Graham reports from Ireland

Paul Graham is currently in Ireland for his show at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin. Paul reports that he is staying at Harvey's Point in Donegal. The place looks amazing...

Paul Graham, Harvey's Point

The Douglas Hyde Gallery has this to say about Paul's show.

Paul Graham, a shimmer of possibility
27 July - 19 September, 2012

In the summer of 2004, having moved to New York from London two years before, Paul Graham set out on the first of many trips around America to explore and photograph the country. This exhibition has been chosen by the artist from the resulting series of images, entitled a shimmer of possibility, which was first published in 2007 and has since been shown in many galleries and museums around the world, including MoMA, New York. Inspired by the short stories of Chekhov, each series (the original publication was made up of twelve slim books) includes a varying number of pictures and provides an attentive recollection of ordinary moments in the lives of some people Graham encountered on his travels. Including such subjects as a woman eating a take-out meal, a man cutting the grass, or people waiting at a bus-stop, they reflect aspects of ordinary American life that are infused, if you look carefully, with wonder and acceptance. As Graham has said, "Perhaps instead of standing at the river's edge scooping out water, it's better to be in the current itself, to watch how the river comes up to you, flows smoothly around your presence, and reforms on the other side as if you were never there."

Click here to view the publication which accompanies this exhibition.

Paul Graham has exhibited at many major museums and galleries around the world; earlier this year he won the prestigious international 'Hasselblad Award'. He is represented by Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; The Pace Gallery, New York; and Pace MacGill, New York, amongst other galleries.

www.paulgrahamarchive.com

It was a pleasure to see an installation of Paul's shimmer work currently showing at MoMA in New York.  

Paul Graham - a shimmer of possibility, MoMA, NYC

I asked Paul what his plans are for new work. He told me kittens, flowers and babies. If anybody can make a combination like that work Paul can. Watch this space...

TIMEMACHINE Issue 6 now online

 
TIMEMACHINE is an online photography project edited by Lee Grant with contributions from Tom Williams and Sarah Rhodes.  Based in Australia, the quarterly editions aim to showcase recent and long-term projects by Australian and international photographers.

The photographers showcased in issue 6,  ATOMIC, are Jessie Boylan and Anthony Kelly, Guillame Herbaut, Barry W. Hughes, Miyako Ishiuchi, Alex James, Mark Klett, Robert Knoth and Michael Light.

TIME MACHINE says this: From documentary to conceptual imagery, the issue presents the message that nuclear energy is both invisible and insidious. Robert Knoth’s images of the Fukushima landscape are disconcerting in their beauty. He shows abandoned and overgrown rural settings, where the radiation-affected trees are starting to look like ancient forests. Guillame Herbaut's photographs have an eerie feeling as if he is photographing something ethereal, not tangible.  His poisoned forests are haunting as he shows them slowly die. Jess Boylan has contributed the essay about her trip out to Maralinga, in South Australia, looking at the site where the British tested 12 atomic bombs and made hundreds of smaller trials. She found the landscape layered with history and memories which made for an unsettling experience.
Tokyo-based photo consultant Yumi Goto is interviewed about her involvement in curating and editing images coming out of Fukushima. She shares some fascinating insights about digital publishing platforms, the life of images once they are taken and her interest in photographers who have an intimate relationship with their subject matter. Australian writer, Jess Scully also offers a thoughtful review of Robert Knoth and Antoinette de Jong's recently published book, Poppy.

You can see TIMEMACHINE issue 6 HERE

Self Publish, Be Happy and the DIY photobook phenomenon

 
The guardian reports on the rise and rise of London based Bruno Ceschel's Self Publish, Be Happy, an online hub for those of us involved in making, collecting, investigating the home-made photobook.

Guardian critic and writer Sean O'Hagan has this to say,

SPBH is the brainchild of writer and academic Bruno Ceschel. It was founded with the aim of "celebrating, studying and promoting self-published photobooks" via events, publications and the web. Not strictly a publisher, SPBH runs workshops that show photographers how to make and distribute their own books, posting the results on their daily blog and acting as a repository of knowledge.
"People send us the physical object," says Ceschel. "It could be a book or a stapled 'zine. Then we choose what we like and put it up on the site with all the details of how it was made, where it was printed, how much it costs and how to order a copy. It's all about thinking and creating outside the mainstream model of publishing, which most young photographers can't afford or simply don't want to get involved with."
Now SPBH are actually publishing a book of their own; or, to be more precise, three books bearing their imprint over the next year. The first is entitled AB&OC and features polaroids by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, who gave Ceschel his first job back when they were creative directors of Benneton's controversial COLORS magazine. It's a rather beautiful little book: a random selection of polaroids, some of which were done as test shots for editorial shoots. There are portraits (Amy Winehouse, Paula Rego, Alsion Lapper, Adam by Oliver and Oliver by Adam) as well as still lifes (skulls, a leaf, a bird's nest) and a shot of Adam's right foot and Oliver's right hand. The print run is 250 and each comes with an original polaroid mounted on the cover: a picture of a hand, or hands, forming a word in sign language.

Read the full guardian story HERE and go to the Self Publish, Be Happy site HERE

The Photography Room, Queanbeyan NSW shows Tim Brook

 
The latest show at The Photography Room in Queanbeyan NSW features the work of Tim Brook in an exhibition called Observations.
I don't often post material from south of the equator because my interest lies in Europe and North America. However this Australian gallery, in a place not many may have ever heard of, is well worth putting on your radar. What they show seems always of substance and well worth a look. Tim Brook's show is no exception. The show runs 3 August until 2 September 2012. Here are some images. 
You can go to the gallery site HERE.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, an interview

This rare interview with the ever modest Henri Cartier-Bresson is well worth a look. You can go to it HERE.

John Gossage, THE CODE a new book from Harper's Books

Tokyo has been photographed more times than we have all had hot dinners. Does the world need any more photographs of Tokyo? The answer is yes if they happen to be made by John Gossage. In his new bookwork THE CODE, Gossage has done the seemingly imposssible with a series of photographs that are fresh, compelling, mysterious  and yet so simple.

THE CODE from Harper's Books, 2012. First Edition. Quarto. Limited to 1000 copies. Published on the occasion of Gossage's exhibition at Harper's Books, East Hampton, August 18 - October 1, 2012. A collection of color photographs shot in and around Tokyo. While Gossage's trademark celebration of the banal is certainly on display here, the photographer charts new territory with shots of Tokyo street scenes, skyscapes and tissue boxes. Fine in a fine jacket, sealed in shrink-wrap.

There is also a Deluxe Edition. Quarto. Limited to 26 SIGNED and numbered copies, and issued with an original color ink-jet print, 8 1/2 X 11 inches, SIGNED by Gossage and housed in a custom cloth folder and slipcase. Custom folder, gray slipcase.


You can see more on Harper's Books site HERE.

New York, first photographs

Now back in Auckland, from NYC heatwave to southern winter. Here are some preliminary images...

New York - away in the BIG Apple for 2 weeks

I'll be traveling for the next two weeks so will not be able to make any regular blog posts. Normal service will resume after July 17!

ONE DAY revisted, June 21st 2012

 
Back on June 21st 2010, the longest day in the northern hemisphere and the shortest in the southern, ten photographers, Jessica Backhaus, Gerry Badger, John Gossage, Todd Hido, Rob Hornstra, Rinko Kawauchi, Eva Maria Ocherbauer, Martin Parr, Alec Soth and myself all set out to make a book in a day. The result was published by Kehrer and launched at Paris Photo in November 2010.

Last year and again this, on June 21st I set out to revisit the day and make some photographs. So too did John Gossage. He sent me these which he tells me recounts the famous Danish folk tale of how Thilde finds that even the smallest things can have the most profound effect.

And the question we always ask.

Here is what I shot, with a common thread of loss and abandonment.

Photography After Photography? (A Provocation) from Joerg Colberg

Paul Graham, Pittsburgh, 2004, from the series 'A Shimmer of Possibility'.

Last week on his blog Conscientious (you can see the full post HERE) Joerg Colberg wrote a piece which made the point that photography had become tired, predictable and preoccupied with a past way of seeing things.  Joerg said this:

Photography has finally arrived at its own existential crisis. It is far from being over - no medium is ever over as long as there is just an ounce of creativity left on this planet. But photography has long been running in a circle. Over the past ten years, it has increasingly become dominated by nostalgia and conservatism. Even the idea that we now need editors or curators to create meaning out of the flood of photographs ultimately is conservative, looking backwards when we could, no we should be looking forward.Who - or what - can move photography forward, looking forward?

Any art form needs to evolve. Otherwise, there’s stasis, and stasis in art is death (just ask any jazz musician). These kinds of debates are being held in other art forms; it’s not just a photography thing. The one thing that seems unique to photography (maybe this is just me not being familiar enough with other art forms) is that its practitioners for the most part are incredibly conservative as far as the medium is concerned. So I could have also asked whether photography will survive the conservatism the vast majority of its own practitioners have come to embrace. I currently doubt it will. To use jazz again, with its current wave of nostalgia photography is at risk of becoming the Dixieland of the visual arts.

What Joerg has said is true. There is so much wrong with the state of photography today. The problem lies not just with the photographers. Art schools must share the blame, they seem to have given up teaching the history of the medium and have become side-tracked into theoretical backwaters. And then there is the commodified dealer gallery system, gallerists obsessed with "product", showing easy decorative work that will sell.

And the photographers. Given the avalanche of images out there I sense a feeling of desperation to succeed. No longer content to be called photographers, today we want to be seen as "artists".  This accolade has to be earned and not by work that's contrived, derivative, formulaic, seen it all before and just plain dull. I'm so over seeing images dragged from the internet (100 of this or these), constructed pictures of people standing in fields holding things, (maybe bags over their heads), groups of preppy kids running naked through fields, forests and/or sand-dunes and photographs of mid-west families standing against a fence.

It's sad really because there are so many good, even great photographs out there in life to be made. It's about having an idea and "seeing". Seeing clearly. Dealing with the ordinary and the obvious. Eggleston said that he was at war with the obvious. And so we all should be, in the sense that we need to transform the obvious and do something with it. Surely then the work becomes art because the photographs question and demand that we look at the world in a fresh more telling way. Two photographers that I immediately think of do this. Their work is from the heart, authentic and so simple. I'm talking about Paul Graham and John Gossage. Photographers yes but true artists.

Look, be inspired and go out and make some pictures.

John Gossage, Map of Babylon, 2009

Photographers whose work I like - No18/ Pierre Defaix

Pierre Defaix, from the series Short Stories, (Number 9)

I've never met Pierre Defaix and his work was unknown to me. He approached me a few days ago and asked me to look at his pictures.  What struck me immediately was that although we are looking at similar things Pierre's way of seeing is totally different to mine. I like the obvious satisfaction he derives from his looking at small scenarios and simple pleasures and the short stories that result. His observation of that which we often overlook in our quest for the "bigger picture" is acute and memorable.

Pierre Defaix was born in France, in 1971. After graduating from University of Sorbonne, Paris with a Bachelor of cinema and media and a Bachelor of comparative Literature, he obtained a fellowship  to study at Brown University , Providence, Rhode Island, USA . He followed the coursework in film making with the filmmaker Leslie Thornton. Back in Paris  he began his photographic career as a freelance photographer making fashion editorial and portraits for magazine and newspapers. He also worked several years as a stills photographer  for film production companies.  He is currently based in Nice, France. You can go to his website HERE.

And below, images from the bookwork,  All things I remember from here.

Lost Places Sites of photography at Hamburger Kunsthalle

Tobias Zielony. Dirt Field, 2008 (from the series Trona – Armpit of America)

In recent years photography has reached a new peak in artistic media. Starting with the Düsseldorf School, with artists such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, or Candida Höfer, a young generation of artists developed that adopted different approaches by which to present the subject matter of "space" and "place" in an era of historic change and social crises. With the exhibition Lost Places, the Hamburger Kunsthalle dedicates an exhibition to these new approaches, which document a wide range of different places and living spaces and their increasing isolation through the media of photography, film, and installation works.

Joel Sternfeld's documentary photographs depict places that were crime scenes. Thomas Demand restages real crime scenes, initially as models in order to then photograph them. In turn, in her large-scale photographs, Beate Gütschow constructs cityscapes and landscapes that are reminiscent of well-known places, but that do not allow any true reference. Sarah Schönfeld illustrates "the image of memory in the present space" in her photographs. She visits old places from her GDR childhood and captures these in their present state, whereby both points in time collide. In his fictional video installation Nostalgia, Omer Fast recounts the story of illegal immigrants from three different perspectives.

In his book The Collective Memory, French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs pointed out the significance of "spatial images" for the memory of social communities. Today the reliable spatial contextualisation of objects and memories (also due to digital photography) is under threat, hence this pretence begins to crumble. What happens to real places if a space loses its usual significance and can be experienced on a virtual plane? The exhibition comprises about 20 different approaches of contemporary photography and video art with many loans from museums and private collections.

The exhibition features the following artists: Thomas Demand (b. 1964), Omer Fast (b. 1972), Beate Gütschow (b. 1970), Andreas Gursky (b. 1955), Candida Höfer (b. 1944), Sabine Hornig (b. 1964), Jan Köchermann (b. 1967), Barbara Probst (b. 1964), Alexandra Ranner (b. 1967), Ben Rivers (b. 1972), Thomas Ruff (b. 1958), Gregor Schneider (b. 1969), Sarah Schönfeld (b. 1979), Joel Sternfeld (b. 1944), Thomas Struth (b. 1954), Guy Tillim (b. 1962), Jörn Vanhöfen (b. 1961), Jeff Wall (b. 1946) and Tobias Zielony (b. 1973).

Lost Places. Sites of photography 
8 June – 23 September 2012

Hamburger Kunsthalle
Glockengießerwall
20095 Hamburg
www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de

Masahisa Fukase died last week

Fukase was born on 25 February 1934 in Hokkaido. Among Fukase's early works was the Kill the Pigs (1961) concerning a slaughterhouse. Fukase's photographs of his family and his bride, received considerable attention in numerous exhibitions and magazines; these were collected in his second book, published in 1978. The last book that he supervised, Karasu (Ravens), was shot in in 1976 in Hokkaido in the wake of his divorce, and was published in 1986. The gloomy and emotional photos are a sharp contrast to his earlier works.
In 2010, a panel of five experts, including photographer Chis Killip and the writer Gerry Badger, convened by the British Journal of Photography selected Karasu as the best photobook published between 1986 and 2009. In 1992, Fukase suffered traumatic brain injury from a fall, and remained in a coma. He died on 9 June 2012.

You can read Sean O'Hagan's piece in the Guardian, Masahisa Fukase's Ravens: the best photobook of the past 25 years? HERE

Elton John AIDS Foundation Photography Portfolio 11

Rineke Dijkstra, Sir Elton John, 2011

Elton John AIDS Foundation (EJAF) has released its second Photography Portfolio. It is a collection of ten signed and numbered prints by some of the world’s most outstanding international names in contemporary photography. It features the work of photographers from five countries: Tina Barney (USA), Rineke Dijkstra (Netherlands), Elger Esser (Germany), Candida Höfer (Germany), Chen Jiagang (China), David LaChapelle (USA), Alex Prager (USA), Ed Ruscha (USA), Hedi Slimane (France), and Frank Thiel (Germany).

Published by Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta, GA. the series has been produced in an  edition size  of 40 plus 12 artist proofs, on a paper size of 20 x 24 inches. Each portfolio is enclosed in a custom-designed, archival photographic storage box that includes the ten photographs, a table of contents and a letter to the purchaser signed by Sir Elton John. Photographs included in the EJAF Photography Portfolio II are unique and are only available through purchase of the entire $25,000 portfolio.

Proceeds from the sale of this limited edition photography portfolio will support the Foundation’s important work on behalf of urgently needed front-line HIV prevention programs in under-served communities across the United States, the Americas, and the Caribbean.

Tina Barney, The Lipstick, 1999

The Dutch Photobook at Aperture NYC, Wednesday this week

On this coming Wednesday, June 13, at 6.30pm Aperture and the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York are pleased to present The Dutch Photobook, a presentation and reception with Frits Gierstberg. Join Frits Gierstberg, curator of the Netherlands Photomuseum and co-author of The Dutch Photobook, who will discuss the ideas and themes behind the book, including the historically strong collaborations between graphic designers and Dutch photographers.  Learn why certain books were included and others were left out. Frits will be joined by special guests Jacqueline Hassink and Dana Lixenberg, whose work is represented in the book. Following the talk, guests will enjoy a reception and special viewing of a selection of Dutch photobooks. Those in attendance will also receive a complimentary copy of The PhotoBook Review. This event is supported by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York. The Dutch Photobook is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Dutch Photobook can be ordered at Aperture here.

The Dutch photobook is internationally recognized for its innovative and collaborative approach between photographers, printers, and designers. Dutch graphic designers have long worked at the forefront of their discipline, often crossing existing boundaries and exploring new territories—qualities that have become an integral part of contemporary Dutch photobook culture.

The current photobook publishing boom in the Netherlands springs from a long-standing tradition of excellence. This tradition precedes WWII, but the aftermath of the war marked a period of particularly close collaboration between photographers and designers. Their contributions led to such unique photography books as Ed van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank (1956) and Chili September by Koen Wessing (1973). Innovations such as the photo novel and the company photobook bloomed in the 1950s and 60s. Later, other genres emerged as part of the publishing landscape, including conceptual and documentary works.

The Dutch Photobook will feature selections from approximately one hundred historic, contemporary, and self-published photobook projects, including landmarks such as Hollandse taferelen by Hans Aarsman (1989), The Table of Power by Jacqueline Hassink (1996), Why Mister Why by Geert van Kesteren (2006), and Empty Bottles by Wassink Lundgren (2007).

Dutch photo historians Frits Gierstberg and Rik Suermondt contribute several texts on the history of the genre, the collaborative efforts between photographers and designers, and their inspiration and influences, to complement the special, high quality reproductions of photobooks. Award-winning designer Joost Grootens contributes unique charts and diagrams that bring all of these elements together, forming a visually unique map of the Dutch photobook.

Frits Gierstberg is the head of exhibitions at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam and Extraordinary Professor of Photography at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. An art historian, curator, and critic, he has published numerous books on Dutch and international photography.

Rik Suermondt is a photo historian and member of the Board of the Urban Photography Utrecht (SFU). He is the author of many articles and books, including In Dutch Eyes—A New History of Photography in the Netherlands (2007).

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, N.Y. 10001
Tel.: 212-505-5555