Roberto M. Tondopó - Casita de Turrón, a strange and wonderful book

 

When recently in Wellington for the Photobook Festival I came across Roberto M. Tondopó's amazing book Casita de Turrón or Gingerbread House. Tondopó is a Mexican photographer and not surprisingly the pictures in this book are saturated with the hues of dusty turquoise, faded pinks and acid yellows. Underlying these bright and cheerful colors there is something sinister going on. The book is like a Pedro Almodóvar movie on speed. 
Each chaotic frame has a complex narrative that draws the reader in, you are left wanting to work out what really is going on. The layered pictures surprise with small details that once observed add a malevolent twist, a sort of "stone in the shoe" that makes one question what seems to be the obvious. For example the boy in the oven with the broken egg shells on the floor. The boy in the bed with a hand at the window. This is a strange, complex and compelling book, hard to work out and hard to put down.

Roberto Tondopó talks about Casita de Turrón: It is a book about the transition between childhood and adolescence of my nephews, Andrea and Angel. Although settled in reality, it is a fictional narrative evoking the transition period in the development of our sexuality.  My interest is to detonate those parts of the repressed unconscious... touching aspects of the sinister, to open the threshold of representation of the image that alludes all interpretation.  My work revolves around... a need to restore those deep connections between past and present, fantasy and memory.

Here are some photographs from Casita de Turrón. You can see the book in its entirety on a vimeo video HERE.

Photography is easy, photography is difficult

 

A good example of a bad photograph!

Making photographs is deceptively easy. That's what makes it so difficult. After all anybody can do it and everybody is. The truth is to make a good photograph, one that works, is incredibly hard. This probably has a something to do with seductive pull of making the pictures, After all there is nothing quite like the pleasure of being in the world, looking at it and shooting. This can be somewhat aimless, with no direction home.

For me, I need to know what I'm shooting for. What's the idea? With a good idea in mind I think you can make better pictures. My ideas are abstract intangible creatures, I don't photograph coal miners, or water towers. A recent book-work of mine was titled NOT FOOD OR SEX. As soon as I came up with that title I could look at a picture and know immediately if it fitted the idea. This meant I could go into my archive and find images that worked and I could shoot with that idea as an objective. This doesn't rule our shooting intuitively, Winogrand's maxim, that he shot so see what things looked like on film (read pixels) still holds.

In March 2012 I made a blog post, Some Thought on Editing and Sequencing, you can go to it HERE.  Jörg Colberg, founder and editor of the well known and influential blog Conscientious wrote to me... he made the point that whatever you do, wherever you want to head with your work you need good photographs. So obvious, so true.  

Well, first of all you have to have good photos to make a good photobook. Without good photos, it's an uphill struggle (some books don't need good photos, but they rely on a great concept). And then the concept of the book just has to work. There's a lot of gimmicky work out there, where people are trying too hard to be cool. So making a really good book is very hard, much harder than most people think. And people don't realize that the only thing that will make books stand out is the quality of the whole package, not your elaborate shrink-wrap or whatever you come up with. So yeah, substance it is.

Then this morning I read the following quote from American writer Jim Harrison - “You have to follow the affections of your heart, and the truth of your imagination. Otherwise, you will feel badly.”

Not a bad starting point. Go well... go out and make photographs, good photographs...

Post Script: A reader reminded me of Paul Graham's 2009 piece, of the same name -  Photography is Easy, Photography is Difficult - you can read that on ASX HERE.
 

John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers Los Angeles

John Baldessari - Maybe the Simplest Way..., 2015

Over the past 50 years, no one has come to epitomise the visual arts in Los Angeles more than John Baldessari. With his vibrant wit and his vast and un-classifiable oeuvre, which includes painting, photography, sculpture and video, he has become a hugely influential artist, while his generosity and brilliance as a teacher has made him a beloved figure among generations of students. 

John Baldessari has always reveled in the playful dislocation between text and image. His most recent body of work, a series of paintings made over the past year, further expands this distinct Baldessari mode. Featuring banal found photographs, altered with his trademark blocks of rich colour, accompanied by equally banal snippets of text that appear like captions beneath the images, the new paintings present the viewer with a pleasing conundrum. The arresting disjunction between text and image opens up an enormous gulf for the viewer’s imagination. The resulting combination of word and image generates a radically anarchic pictorial space. Baldessari's formal daring and ingenious wit, that has made Baldessari such a vital figure in contemporary art. 

John Baldessari John Baldessari (1931, National City, California) lives and works in Santa Monica, California. His works were part of the 47th (1997) and 53rd (2009) Venice Biennials, the Carnegie International (1985-86), the Whitney Biennial (1983), as well as documenta V (1972) and VII (1982). In 2005, an extensive, two-part retrospective was dedicated to the artist at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien and at the Kunsthaus Graz. His large retrospective Pure Beauty opened 2009 at the Tate Modern in London, and subsequently was on view at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2010), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2010/2011). Recently the artist has presented his works in solo exhibitions at the Fondazione Prada, Milan (2010) the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2011) and the Städel Museum, Frankfurt (2015/16). In June 2009, John Baldessari was awarded the Golden Lion at the 53rd Venice Biennial and 2012 the Kaiserring of the city of Goslar for his lifetime achievement. In 2015, he was awarded The National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment of the Arts. 

The exhibition at Sprüth Magers Los Angeles opens February 24 and runs until April 9.

John Baldessari - It's Possible, Although..., 2015

Photographers whose work I like - No30/ Gordon Reynolds

 

American Gordon Reynolds is a former web developer who lives in Sacramento and increasingly spends time in San Francisco. I kept seeing Gordon's work on Instagram and liked what I saw. Perhaps that's because he's looking at the same sort of things that I look at. Whatever the case Gordon Reynolds has a sharp eye for the ordinary and the unusual transforming what he sees into perfect visual Koans. Any attempt to find Gordon's work on-line failed as I later discovered that his only cyber presence is in fact on Instagram.

Gordon says this about his work - I wander, usually in an urban setting, waiting to see what catches my eye. Something almost always does. I don't work on projects but do tend to walk over the same terrain for a long span of time looking for what's changed. Most of my time recently has been spent in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco.Because it's densely populated things tend to change there daily. I am fascinated by what humans do to
the city-scape, especially those things they do offhand, things discarded, or put aside, those temporary alterations they make that will disappear shortly. The evanescence of those changes makes for poignant photographs.

Here is a selection of Gordon's photographs....

Making Art - follow your Heart or the Money?

 

Recovering from two full on weekends, first working with Roger Ballen in a 2 day workshop and then this last weekend in Wellington at the NZ Photobook Festival. The subject of making work and getting it out there cropped up on both occasions. Roger Ballen is firmly of the view that the best work comes from a place deep inside the artist where issues of ones place in the world are examined, mulled over and work follows. I share that view. My talk in Wellington about international exposure touched on the need for authenticity and avoiding chasing fame. Just doing the work. From a Zen perspective, just getting up each day and chopping wood.

Gerry Badger in his essay on John Gosssge from his book The Pleasure of Good Photographs puts it like this. Great artists, great photographers... do not follow the norm, they follow their instincts and convictions, not the herd and the smart money... style and individuality emanates from deep within them, and is not... something grafted on from the outside. 

Joerg Colberg tweeted a piece from ArtNews which picked up the theme.
Product-based art isn’t specific to abstraction or figuration (as an even more recent market shift may be demonstrating) but is the result of dealers and collectors encouraging artists to create more of the same kind of popular work. All too often, museum curators cave to these pressures, too, validating the trend by staging exhibitions of market-darling artists collected by their trustees with a lack of scruples that gives the worst insider traders a run for their money. The path of commercial success may be increasingly easy, but it narrows what could otherwise be probing, expansive, and serendipitous careers. This results-oriented focus can be contrasted to the idea that an artist should be allowed to follow a sustained project of creating art in a passionate and independent way, regardless of market feedback. That might mean changing styles over the years and being less commercially viable at points, but this long-term project will have a notable through-line of a consistent set of questions and issues. The project and its many manifestations are best identified retrospectively, but wandering and doubt are a generative part of it. With some notable exceptions (like Warhol and Courbet, who churned out work like machines), the most fascinating and important artists in history exemplify this approach by remaining true to what drove them to create, rather than caving to external responses. We should all be worried if these artists start disappearing. You can read the complete ArtNews piece written by Daniel S. Palmer. HERE.

It seems to me that if the best work out there comes from probing, questioning and a process of self examination the flip side to that, a practice based on surface considerations produces art that is just about surface. Perhaps that explains why there is so much superficial decorative rubbish out there masquerading as art.

Photographs in Wellington - a PSYCHO moment

 

Last weekend in Wellington for PHOTOBOOK NEW ZEALAND. A juggling act, dealing with Fridays bitter southerly driving in direct from Antarctica, looking at photobooks and listening to presentations, meeting friends, and rummaging through op shops and book shops. And not to forget hanging out with dear daughter Zoë.

To prove that I could chew gum and photograph at the same time, I attempted to squeeze in and squeeze off a few photographs.
Edit today, and OMG it looks as if I was having a PSYCHO moment. I mean the Comfort Hotel in Cuba Street and Bates Motel are on different planets...

Don't be put off, Wellington is great -  quirky, idiosyncratic, lovable, where if you half close your eyes you'd swear it was still 1972. Oh, and not an Auckland Trophy Wife in sight... Here are some pictures:

The Photobook - how to get your work out there...

 

It was a pleasure to be in Wellington last weekend to participate in PHOTOBOOK NEW ZEALAND in its inaugural edition where Kiwi (and some Aussie) practitioners took a hard look at the current state of the world of photobooks.
It was particularly pleasant to participate, along with acknowledged experts Anita Totha and Bruce Connew, in a panel discussion investigating ways to get your work out into the global market place.

Seeking a little inspiration I resorted to a few pointers, scribbled on the back of an envelope from my friend and colleague Antoine D'Agata. It seemed to me if you could follow these points you could do no wrong.

1. 90% of life is showing up (Woody Allen)
2. Take the long view - 30 to 50 years
3. Make your work authentic
4. Don't try and be famous
5. Don't show dodgy work to everybody who has ever drawn breath
6. People work with people they like
7. Luck has a lot to do with it
8. Get naked, make porn

Eve de Castro-Robinson and Harvey Benge collaboration now on CD

 

The contemporary music and image collaboration that was released by RATTLE RECORDS last November as a limited vinyl production is now available as CD. The CD release includes the same 30 page bookwork that I devised to support Eve's compelling and layered compositions. The CD is available from the RATTLE RECORDS website HERE.

There are just a few remaining copies of the collectors edition vinyl production, numbered and signed by the artists. These are also available from RATTLE at the link above.

Stan Douglas 2016 Hasselblad Award Winner

 

Stan Douglas - Mise en scène

The Hasselblad Foundation has announced that Canadian artist Stan Douglas is the recipient of the 2016 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography for the sum of SEK 1,000,000 (approx. EUR 110,000). The award ceremony takes place in Gothenburg, Sweden on October 17, 2016. The day after, on October 18, an exhibition of Douglas’s work will open at the Hasselblad Center. On the same day, the Hasselblad Foundation will host a symposium with the award winner, and a new book about Stan Douglas will be published by MACK.

The Foundation’s citation regarding the 2016 Hasselblad Award Winner Stan Douglas:
An artist of outstanding significance, Stan Douglas has received international recognition for his powerful photographic art, as well as his work with video and film. His practice reflects carefully and poignantly on the history of photography and film, offering new understandings of the cultural and technological developments of both media. Furthermore, Stan Douglas has an open and highly innovative approach to both analogue and new digital formats. At the heart of his work lies a strong interest and commitment to social issues of race, gender, identity and post-colonial politics, whilst maintaining a valuable self-critical perspective on the role of the artist in contemporary culture.

Roger Ballen, Auckland workshop, it's a wrap!

 

A small but dedicated group of photographers from as far afield as Singapore and Christchurch met this last weekend at my home studio to take part in a workshop with photographer Roger Ballen. Roger talked about the philosophy underpinning his practice and showed work from series made in South Africa since the 1970's.

Roger talked about the increasing importance of video productions to compliment his bookworks. The group viewed videos from the series: OUTLAND, Asylum of the Birds and the super strange I FINK U FREEKY by DIE ANTWOOD which has had nearly 78 million hits on YouTube.

Sydney's College of the Arts will be showing Roger Ballen's Theatre of the Mind which opens next week.

Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better - at the Guggenheim NYC

 

From 1979 to 2012, Swiss artists Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) collaborated on a body of work that offers a deceptively casual meditation on how we perceive everyday life. Through a witty “misuse” of cultural genres—from low-budget Hollywood movies and picture-postcard views to the art historical notion of the readymade—they transformed the ordinary into something decisively not.

Never ones to issue statements or dictate meaning, Fischli and Weiss pondered questions great and small, sometimes imitating whimsical philosophers. Perhaps in part because they were a team of two, they challenged the idea of dualism, a cornerstone of Western thought. In one way or another, everything the artists produced playfully unravels what they understood to be “popular opposites”—labor versus leisure, fiction versus reality, kitsch versus beauty, and the banal versus the sublime, among others. Fischli and Weiss undid false divisions with the conviction that bewilderment itself might be a desirable state. They aimed to confuse hierarchies and values by creating systems doomed to fail and found beauty in states of imminent collapse.

This retrospective brings together over three hundred sculptures, photographs, videos, and installations to form the most complete overview of the artists’ work to date. The presentation is not organized chronologically—instead, selections from each of Fischli and Weiss’s major series appear alongside works from other points in their career, creating dialogues that span the pair’s history of working together. This arrangement reflects the overlapping structure of their production and underscores the coherence of their diverse oeuvre. In this way, the exhibition encapsulates their collaboration, bringing into focus the incisive conversation the two artists sustained for thirty-three years.

Initially planned during David Weiss’s lifetime, Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better is organized by Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator, and Nat Trotman, Curator, Performance and Media, in close collaboration with Peter Fischli.

To coincide with this exhibition, two public works by Fischli and Weiss will appear on the streets of New York. From February 5 to May 1, Public Art Fund presents the text-based monument to labor How to Work Better (1991) as a wall mural at the corner of Houston and Mott Streets. At 11:57 pm nightly throughout February, the video Büsi (Kitty) (2001) will appear in Times Square as part of Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment program.

The exhibition opens at the Guggenheim February 5 and runs until April 27.

Photographers whose work I like - No29/ Betsy Schneider

 

Arizona based photographer and educator Betsy Schneider talks about her drive for intensity, beauty and complexity in her work. Schneider's photographs have all these qualities and more. Why? Simply because her pictures are profoundly authentic and come from a place in her heart and head where her own life experience openly informs the work. There is no shred of artifice here, or clever masquerading as intelligent.

Schneider says this: I make photos. I make videos. I make dinner for my kids. I feel guilty about my carbon footprint but it doesn’t stop me from driving too much. I can’t sit still. I am told I complain too much but it is really hot in Arizona. I like to juggle the soccer ball on the sidelines of my kids’ games. I like to rave to my students about my newest TV obsessions. I like to read my students Facebook status updates to see what absurdly hyperbolic statement I have made in class. Hyperbole aside, I believe deeply in the importance of art in making our lives rich and complex and for keeping us in touch with our humanity. 

Betsy Schneider received a BA from the University of Michigan in 1987, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1990 and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California in 1997. Before attending graduate school, she lived in Prague for a year and was a live-in assistant to Sally Mann. After graduate school she spent four years living and working in London, England, where she taught photography and English. She also lived a year in Trondheim, Norway. In 2002 she joined the School of Art faculty at Arizona State University where she currently a tenured Associate Professor.  She divides her time between Tempe, Arizona and Sharon, Massachusetts.

I've posted here a selection of images from Betsy Schneider's project Triskaidekaphobia.
This series is a collection of images, videos and words from thirteen-year-olds, coming together to provide a portrait of early adolescence in 2012.

You can see more of Betsy Schneider's work on her website HERE.

LA ART BOOK FAIR - February 11 to 14, 2016

 

Printed Matter presents the fourth annual LA Art Book Fair, from February 11 – 14, 2016, at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. A preview will be held on the evening of Thursday
February 11, 2016, from 6 to 9 pm, at Geffen Contemporary.

With exhibitors from 24 or more counties, these particular participants caught my eye:

Remote Photobooks distributes selected photobooks and photo-related publications from both established and emerging photographers and independent publishers in New Zealand. Founded by Anita Tótha and based in Auckland, New Zealand. remotephotobooks.com/ 

SUPER LABO is a Kamakura (Japan) based independent publishing house focused on contemporary photograph. Founded in 2009 in Tokyo by Yasunori Hoki. www.superlabo.com/ 

Perimeter is a bookstore, publisher and distributor from Melbourne, Australia, with an interest in contemporary photography, art, design and architecture, and their interface with the printed form. perimeterbooks.com/

Mörel Books is a London-based independent publisher specializing in affordable limited edition art books and zines. Working with established artists alongside new and upcoming talents, our books are made in close collaboration with the artist, reducing the distance between the artist’s vision and that of the viewer. Many of our books can be purchased with limited edition prints. morelbooks.com/ 

You can go to the LA ART BOOK FAIR website HERE.

PHOTOBOOK NEW ZEALAND - a book fair celebrating independant and small press photographers' books

 

The premier edition of PHOTOBOOK NEW ZEALAND takes place over three days in March, the 11th to 13th, and will be presented in Wellington at Massey University's College of Creative Arts.

With panel discussions and presentations by luminaries such as Daniel Boetker-Smith, Ron Brownson, Jonty Valentine, Catherine Griffiths, Neil Pardington, Bruce Connew, Becky Nunes and Anita Tótha - there are more than enough reasons to head to Wellington (one of my favorite and most loved cities) for this top event.

There is also the New Zealand Photobook of the Year Awards presented by Photobook New Zealand and Momento Pro, established to support excellence in self-published and trade published photo books. There is still time to enter before 8 Feb 2016.

You can find the full program HERE. See you in Wellington!

ASIA-PACIFIC PHOTOBOOK ARCHIVE at Photographers' Gallery, London Saturday February 6

 

If you happen to be in London on Saturday February 6, head over to The Photographers' Gallery where between 2 and 4pm you can see and discover a collection of photobooks fresh from south of the equator. Assembled under the banner of The ASIA-PACIFIC PHOTOBOOK ARCHIVE the collection was founded by the remarkable Melbourne based photographer and photo educator Daniel Boetker-Smith. Dan will be present to take you through the archive.

The ASIA-PACIFIC PHOTOBOOK ARCHIVE is a traveling library of self-published and trade photobooks that promotes and features work only from the Asia-Pacific region. The Archive is a not-for-profit organisation that exists to help spread the word about the wealth of important and original work coming out of the region.The collection travels internationally each year to festivals, fairs and exhibitions showcasing the vast array of books it has accumulated since starting in 2013. All of the books in its collection are featured on their website with direct links to the publishers and/or photographer/s. The Archive also has a permanent space, open to the public, in Melbourne, Australia.

You can go to the ASIA-PACIFIC PHOTOBOOK ARCHIVE website HERE.

Ida Pimenoff - Book of Hours

Ida Pimenoff's small but perfectly formed book-work Book of Hours arrived in my mailbox today, thank you Ida. The book engages the reader's head and heart, not only with the demands of its questions but through its honest authenticity. There is no cleverness here, no striving for effect for effects sake. The book pulls you back through its text and images with thoughts and ideas that resonate with ones own life experience. What's more, the book has an almost diaristic feel and a pleasant tactility with its mellow off-white paper stock and Swiss binding.

Kehrer the publisher say this: Book of Hours is the third photobook by Finnish photographer Ida Pimenoff. In her new work, Pimenoff combines images of everyday life with text: short pieces of fiction, random thoughts, memories. The main theme of the new book is time; the strange paradox that although days, in all their banality, often follow each other in a predictable manner, every single moment is unique. There is no going back. While the work deals with the passing of time, it also deals with memories (both light and dark), dreams, wishes, longing and loss. The title of the book, which refers to old, medieval, illustrated prayer books, wants to make the viewer pause for a moment, meditate on the mystery of life. Why are we here? What for? Who am I? And: where am I going? 

These simple words at then end of Ida's book struck a note with me:

This is me:
I made this book; these images and these words.
I wanted them to look as much like me as I could.
So that you could see me, and maybe, then,
I could see you too.

You can have a look at more of Ida Pimenoff's work on her web site HERE.