The Observer - The Month in Photography

The Observer has recently launched an online monthly guide to the best of what's happening in photography, including both exhibitions and books. The overview is presented in the form of a slide show and is well worth a look, HERE.

Below are some frames from February's presentation:

Auckland: AUT St Paul Street Gallery, 2013 photography workshop

Todd Hido, Harvey Benge and Paul Graham

I'm starting to think about which photographers we might invite for the January 2013 AUT St Paul Street Gallery photography workshop here in Auckland. For those readers of my blog who may have been to a past workshop or those perhaps considering attending next year, if you have any ideas and suggestions of particular photographers who might rock your boat, please email your thoughts to me at: harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz

As a reminder as to who we've had over the past seven years of workshops, there has been, Antoine D'Agata, Peter Bialobrzeski, Lewis Baltz, Slavica Perkovic, John Gossage, Alec Soth, Rineke Dijkstra, Paul Graham (twice), Todd Hido, Pieter Hugo and curator Quentin Bajac.
I look forward to your suggestions. And if you'd like to register your interest in the 2013 workshop now, you could also drop me an email.

The class of 2012 with Pieter Hugo and Quentin Bajac

Harper's Books at AIPAD New York

Harper Levine, photobook seller from East Hampton NY, never fails to excite and amaze with his offerings of rare and exceptional photobooks.  Here is selection he is offering at AIPAD Photography Fair which opens in New York tomorrow.

You can see the highlights HERE and the full list HERE

Auckland: Luke Willis Thompson, inthisholeonthisislandwhereiam

Luke Willis Thompson's work inthisholeonthisislandwhereiam is a demanding, brave and highly personal work, as confrontational as Tracey Emin's 1999 readymade My Bed but without the fuck you attitude.

Viewers are driven by taxi from the artist's central city gallery, Hopkinson Cundy, to a Victorian period villa in the suburb of Epsom and left to wander through the rooms of the house. Immediately, ones concept of house and home is challenged. Many viewers, I imagine would come from a decidedly Bobo background and this house is far from that. Run down, dirty and packed with junk. Seemingly unloved, disrupting the idea of home comfort, security, warmth and nurture. And yet there is humanity here in the small things. Religious icons a sign of beliefs held, music and a piano, cats, kids toys, family photographs. Normal things. Yet, there is something else. I'm left with an unsettling feeling of an unspeakable past, of horrific events that have happened here that we don't want to know about.

The readymade is about modification and I'm looking for that as I walk through these rooms. But I can't see it. This opens up the nature of perception, what are we really looking at here? I'm thinking of impermanence, the passage of time, the essence of things and our own highly subjective, filtered view of reality, of what and how we see.

This work is a profoundly estranging experience, one that asks more questions than gives answers. It lingers with me still and is not to be missed.

Transport to the Epsom site is provided by Hopkinson Cundy. The work can only be viewed strictly during gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday 11am-6pm and Saturday 11am-3pm up until March 31st. Allow approximately 45 minutes to view the work in its entirety. Bookings (especially for more than 4 people) are appreciated but not essential.

You can go to the Hopkinson Cundy site HERE

And some photographs I made:

Paul Graham, an overview

Recently I came across this site, Lost in Publications. The site offers a comprehensive overview of the work of a handful of photographers all of whom I admire. These include Rob Hornstra, Rinko Kawauchi, Rineke Dijkstra and most recently Paul Graham.

The sites author, Sören, has traced the evolution of Graham's practice with images from his bookworks and commentary.  Well worth a look and a read. 

Included in the text is this pointed quote from Paul which comes from an interview with Aaron Schuman in the online photography magazine SEESAW. The interview  is well worth a read, you can go to it HERE.

"I’m very interested in what keeps this medium alive and moving forward, not just for myself but for the readers/viewers/public. We can all point out cases of rather dead, moribund photography, even sincere reportage photography, where however worthy the intentions of the photographer, however hard they have worked, they’re using a language that has essentially dried up and fails to reach people. If the images have become clichéd, it’s self-defeating."

How to make a photobook, Jörg Colberg writes....

Jörg Colberg publisher of the brilliant photography blog Conscientious has just written a piece, How to make a photobook.

Jörg writes: There actually is no simple recipe for photobook making. If you asked ten people about how to make a photobook, you’d probably end up with ten different answers. That said, from what I can tell, most photobook makers seem to agree on quite a few things. So I thought I’d throw my own thoughts into the mix. I hope that some people might find them useful.
I am perfectly aware that there are many, many details I’m can’t cover in the following. What is more, you might not agree on some of the details. Let me say this again: The following is not intended to be the recipe to making a photobook. What I do think, though, is that it contains many crucial aspects of photobook making.

If you are even remotely thinking about making a photobook Jörg's article is essential reading. You can go to the full piece HERE.

Auckland, Saturday walking.....

Took my camera for a walk yesterday, wandering the streets around my home. An afternoon of Autumn breezes, gray skies and moments of patchy sunlight. Rain on the way. Days getting shorter with Winter around the corner. Here are some photographs.

Photobook auction, at ADER-Nordmann, Paris

The interest, bordering on obsession with photobook collecting and the associated escalating rise in prices continues with most of the major auction houses offering dedicated photobook sales. The latest, Thursday of  week is at ADER - Nordman, Paris.

Amongst the 320 lots on offer there are books and portfolios from: Nobuyoshi Araki, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Peter Beard, Bernhard & Hilla Becher, Hans Bellmer, Edouard Boubat, Brassaï, Alexey Brodovitch, Bill Burke, René Burri, Harry Callahan, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Larry Clark, Lucien Clergue, Antoine D’Agata, Bruce Davidson, Raymond Depardon, Robert Doisneau, William Eggleston, J. H. Engström, Walker Evans, Andreas Feininger, Joan Fontcuberta, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Ralph Gibson, Nan Goldin, René Groebli, Eikoh Hosoe, Graciela Iturbide, Michael Kenna, André Kerstész, William Klein, Josef Koudelka, Germaine Krull, David Lachapelle, Sergio Larrain, Sol Lewitt, Danny Lyon, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Chris Marker, Daido Moriyama, Ken Ohara, Martin Parr, Irving Penn, Heinz von Perckhammer, Gilles Peress, Willy Ronis, Ferdinando Scianna, Stephen Shore, Jean-Loup Sieff, Aaron Siskind, Alec Soth, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Josef Sudek, Yutaka Takanashi, Johan Van der Keuken, Bruce Weber, Garry Winogrand, Weegee, Joël-Peter Witkin.

Here are some pages from the online catalogue which you can see buy going HERE

William Eggleston - dedicated sale at Christies NYC

William Eggleston: a dedicated auction at Christie's New York on March 12th. In their latest  series of single-artist sales Christie's last night presented to the market a collection of classic Eggleston photographs, 36 lots in total. The pigment prints were in a new large format, 112 x 152 cm, all in an edition of two.
Philippe Garner, Christie's International Head of Photographs, evokes the qualities that make Eggleston's work so special:

Here are photographs in which the commonplace becomes strangely compelling; emotionally neutral suburban scenes that might otherwise appear to have little character are transformed by the subtle embrace of a warm, early-evening light; everyday things, including the most banal elements of domestic interiors that would normally fail to attract our attention, let alone our curiosity, succeed in indelibly fixing their forms, and their very existence, in our consciousness. Eggleston’s discreet roving eye moves fluidly through space, lingering briefly and surely to capture the alignment of elements that will constitute a picture that has integrity and quiet expressiveness.
How does one begin to characterise or explain the very particular sensibility expressed in William Eggleston's photographs? Perhaps there is no adequate verbal equivalent to the pictorial results of this singular photographer's on-going existential enquiry. His pictures just are – without an evident agenda, yet subtly authoritative in their suggestion of a fatalistic reading of the physical world in all its serendipity and seeming randomness. The distinction between what may be described as ugly or beautiful becomes irrelevant, trivial. These images are softly insistent on being read on their own oblique, unstated terms. Their tenacious subliminal impact has earned an ever-growing appreciation. The photographer gives his audience opportunity to sense his view of the physical world, proposing the elements of a relationship of a very particular order, one that is ever-curious, yet non-judgmental, accepting, and touched with a fine-tuned, one might say poetic susceptibility.

Some of the photographs:

Lot 3, untitled 1979, realized $314,500

Lot 6, untitled 1973, realized $422,500

Lot 15, untitled, realized $170,500

Lot 18, untitled 1970, realized $194,500

Lot 22, untitled 1973, realized $386,500

Lot 24, untitled 1979, realized $578,500

 You can see more on Christie's site HERE

Post script: Last week’s William Eggleston auction at Christie’s was an enormous success. All 36 photos up for sale were sold for a total sum of $5,900,250. Profits from the sale will go to the Eggleston Artistic Trust.

The Photobook - some thoughts on editing and sequencing

The workprints

 Anybody who has ever made a photobook has started out with a system, a methodology of going about it. A way of (hopefully) making it brilliant. Much has been said about this subject and guidelines laid down by people who know more than most.  Think Gerry Badger and John Gossage. Yet still, why is it that so many photobooks I look at just don't cut it?

Right now I'm in the process of editing, sequencing and designing a new bookwork so this post is really written to myself, a reminder of things I must remember not to forget. I've written about this before but the fundamentals can bear repeating over and over again. Here goes.....

1. Have a strong compelling idea. Fresh, exciting, demanding. Not derivative or seen it all before.

2. Come up with a riveting, compelling title for the book. And do an amazon check and make sure somebody else hasn't got there first.

3. Start with really good photographs, many more than you will finally need.

4. Including  bad pictures will only drag down the good ones.

5. Don't shoehorn in a crap picture just because it fits the idea. Nor include a great picture that doesn't fit the idea.

6. Make a sequence that surprises, challenges and puzzles. Ask more questions than give answers.

7. When you put pictures together don't make the reason blindingly obvious and make sure the sum of the parts is not less than the impact of the individual photographs.

8. Try and sequence the book based on a conceptual flow not purely visually.  A  sequence made visually is generally too obvious not to mention dull and boring.

9. Don't have more pictures than necessary. A book of around 50 or so pictures will work best. Less is often more.

10. Give the pictures room to breath with plenty of white space.

11. Consider the rhythm and flow of the work. Sequencing photographs is like composing music.

12. Think about what makes a great artwork and make sure what's been done measures up to that. Does the work have  a sense of mystery, a veiled narrative and a reason for the reader to want to come back (and back) to consider the work?

13. Don't over-design  the bookwork. The book is for the photographs not as a showcase for clever design. In fact avoid "clever" completely.

14. Make sure the work has a feeling of authenticity about it. Avoid the contrived.

15. Make the edit and the sequence and then do it again, and again, because it can always be done better. Always.

16. When you have something you really think works make a book dummy which is a close as possible to the final book. This will give you a sense of the outcome of the work on both a visual and tactile level.

17. Finally, remember there are no rules. And even if you think there are, set out to break them. 

In the past I've made bookworks by printing postcard size prints of the potential images and spreading them out on a large table to edit and sequence. Although with this book I did make postcard prints I also went directly to making an indesign document and then converting the work to PDF files as I went. I've ended up with umpteen PDFs that chart the progress of the work, gradually refining and hopefully making the book better. I find this method really flexible and simple and using indesign is a breeze.

The NO pictures

The YES pictures

The book dummy

As an addendum to this post, in an email exchange, Jörg Colberg, founder and editor of the well known and influential blog Conscientious wrote this. All true and good advice.
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.

Robert Adams: THE PLACE WE LIVE - at LACMA

Since taking up photography in the mid-1960s as a response to the rapidly changing landscape of his native Colorado, Robert Adams has been widely regarded as one of the leading chroniclers of the American West. Edited and sequenced by Adams himself, The Place We Live surveys a career spanning four decades. This unprecedented retrospective features nearly 300 black-and-white photographic prints as well as a selection of the artist's many important photo books. Adams’s work reflects his extended dedication to describing the changing Western landscape, the growth of its built environment and the lives of its inhabitants. The Los Angeles presentation highlights Adams’s extraordinary portrayal of the terrain of the Los Angeles region. The exhibition opens at LACMA today and runs until June 3.

Since his early years as a photographer, books have occupied a central place in Robert Adams’s artistic practice. Following his belief that “photography is editing - start to finish,” he and his wife, Kerstin, have worked together, sometimes over many years, to arrange groups of pictures into expansive sequences expressly conceived for the printed page.

The over thirty monographs that Adams has published to date harness the unique narrative and poetic potential of the book format, allowing individual images to relate to and build upon each other in order to form larger visual statements capable of addressing complex questions. Not only do these volumes trace the evolution of the photographer’s vision, they also afford the richest view of his lifelong endeavor to faithfully describe “a landscape into which all fragments, no matter how imperfect, fit perfectly.

The Yale Art Gallery site offers a comprehensive overview of all Adams' bookworks each with a full description including date of publication and number of plates.
It is well worth a look, HERE.

Paul Graham - 2012 Hasselblad Award Winner

The Hasselblad Foundation is pleased to announce British photographer Paul Graham as the recipient of the 2012 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography for SEK 1,000,000 (approximately GBP 95,000, US$150,000), The award ceremony will take place in London on March 8, 2012. An exhibition of his work, Paul Graham – 2012 Hasselblad Award Winner will open on October 26, 2012 at the Hasselblad Center at the Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden, in connection with which, one or more seminars will be arranged with the award winner.
The Foundation’s citation regarding the decision to award the 2012 prize to Paul Graham is as follows:
Paul Graham is one of the most brilliant photographers of his generation. During the course of his nearly 40-year career, he has presented an extremely focused body of work, at once perfectly coherent and never monotonous. In images both sensitive and subtly political, he makes tangible the insignificant traces of ″the spirit of the times″ we do not normally see. With his keen awareness of the photographic medium, he has constantly developed innovative forms of working with all aspects of photography. This makes him a profound force for renewal of the deep photographic tradition of engagement with the world.

Sean O'Hagan the guardian's photography writer wrote in yesterday's issue, a piece about Paul's win. You can read it HERE.

O'Hagan reminds readers about Graham's comment about his practice, where he said, "It has steadily become less important to me that the photographs are about something in the most obvious way. I am interested in more elusive and nebulous subject matter. The photography I most respect pulls something out of the ether of nothingness." 

We should all tattoo that last sentence on the back of one hand. Both hands even!

And the Paul Graham Archive is well worth a look HERE.

Websites - it's not hard to make them easy

My friend and photographer Jessica Hines posted this on FB, lamenting the cost and difficulty of designing and running a website that looks great and is easy to change:

I have a website that I like (http://www.jessicahines.com/) and have had for years but it is getting too expensive now to maintain + I must wait for the person who manages it to make changes. I wish I had the skills to create my own website but as I do not, am looking for an easy and inexpensive (ha) new approach. Any suggestions? I hope I don't make a mistake in switching gears...Thank you!

I replied saying that I'd had this problem too and was kindly pointed in a new direction by a well informed friend who suggested I look at virb.com who provide very easy to use templates. This I have done and haven't looked back. I can now add pages to my site in a matter on minutes. It looks good, is easy to use and is not expensive.

You can see my virb originated site harveybenge.com HERE and virb HERE

Andy Adams of Flak Photo Network has given me this link to a previous discussion on websites. The link lists a number of options including virb. See it HERE

As a post-script to the above I was pleased to see that British photographer, writer, blogger and photo educator Colin Pantall has picked up on this post and has quickly, simply and easily made himself a new website. You can have a look at it HERE and I must say it looks great. And I really like Colin's work too!

Gillian Wearing at Whitechapel Gallery, London

Identity project 1992 - 93

 Opening March 28, Whitechapel Gallery will show the films and photographs of British artist Gillian Wearing. Born Birmingham1963, Wearing's work explores our public personas and private lives. This Turner Prize winner’s remarkable works draw on fly-on-the-wall documentaries, reality TV and the techniques of theatre, to explore how we present ourselves to the world.Wearing’s portraits and mini-dramas reveal a paradox, given the chance to dress up, put on a mask or act out a role, the liberation of anonymity allows us to be more truly ourselves.
The exhibition begins with the artist herself, dancing in a shopping mall, blissfully unaware of her bemused audience. The idea of performance continues with works including Wearing’s 1997 masterpiece, 10–16. Adults lip synch the voices and act out the physical tics of seven children in a captivating  film which moves from the breathless excitement of a ten year old to the existential angst of an adolescent.
Other highlights include Wearing’s iconic 1992 series, Signs that say what you want them to say, and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say where strangers are offered paper and pen to communicate their message. In the upper galleries we enter the inner world of subjectivity. An advert - Confess All On Video. Don’t Worry, You Will Be In Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian… (1994) attracted a series of disturbing disclosures. Wearing jettisons her own identity to adopt the guise of family members or artists such as Diane Arbus or Andy Warhol, so revealing her own background and influence.
This comprehensive survey, which also premieres new films and sculptures, shows how Wearing is both political - often focusing on the dispossessed or the traumatised – and poetic, finding the extraordinary in us all.

The Observer's Tim Adams recently interviewed Gillian Wearing, you can read the article HERE 

Identity project 1992 - 93

Joerg Colberg reviews The Auckland Project

Perceptive as usual, Joerg Colberg has just reviewed The Auckland Project on his site Conscientious. The Auckland Project was the bookwork collaboration between John Gossage and Alec Soth when they were my guests in Auckland for the AUT School of Art and Design workshop in January 2009.

Joerg writes:  “Working alongside John [Gossage] was stressful, but it was also life changing. After learning so much from this master of the medium (and friend), I began the process of dismantling my career.” write Alec Soth about his contribution to The Auckland Project. The book, or rather set of books, was “a trip of departures. Gossage has been working in black and white for over 40 years, and this trip yielded one of the first bodies of work he had ever produced in color.” (quoted from the press blurb) Soth, in turn, left behind his 8x10 camera, to bring a digital one. Since I have been ignoring discussions of cameras on this blog for years now, I’ll continue doing that for this review. Instead, I want to talk about the two photographers’ approach to photography - I do believe the books offer an opportunity to do that.

If anything, for me The Auckland Project reflects the differences in these two photographers’ approaches to photography. One, John Gossage, is only too happy to walk around with his camera, looking for (and finding!) chance moments to take photographs of. The other, Alec Soth, essentially is most comfortable doing the exact opposite: Having a plan, or at least a list of things to look for. So one, Gossage, is fine, and shooting in colour essentially makes no difference whatsoever. The other one, Soth, ends up dismantling his career. Now that might be too simple a view. Of course, I don’t know what went on in New Zealand. I only have the words on the blog and this set of books.

You can read the full review on Conscientious HERE

Timemachine - on line photography magazine, Issue 4

Timemachine is a collaborative project by photographers  Lee Grant and Tom Williams. They say this about their project:

Timemachine publishes contemporary photography from Australia and elsewhere in the world.  Our emphasis is on showing new work and longer term projects; and  bringing the concerns of photographers and their colleagues to wider attention.

Do countries or cultures breed different ways of thinking and seeing?  This is a place to look at new Australian image making alongside a selection of what’s emerging from around the globe.

Timemachine was hatched some years ago in the minds of two photographers, strangers at the time.  We were astounded and invigorated by the range of strong, eye-opening work that was being made at a time when the power of the still image, in the midst of an explosion of visual technologies, was thought by many to be in a period of decline.
Far from it:  photography retains its virtue of bold simplicity and continues to be used, in new ways and old, by thoughtful and original practitioners.  It has found ubiquity via the internet – but popularity hasn’t curbed the steady development of fresh voices.
Issues of the magazine are bimonthly and are based around themes, which can be interpreted loosely or strictly.  We’re interested in a diversity of ideas and styles and encourage submissions from everywhere – and from known or unknown photographers, artists and visual journalists.
We also publish writing on photography:  essays, interviews, criticism, notes from the field.  We want to gauge varying opinions, new forays and developing approaches to the medium. 

The theme for issue four is Domesticated  with bodies of work by Sitthixay Ditthavong, Anna Fox, Sam Harris, Raphaela Rosella, Ward Roberts, Robyn Schwartz and Susan Worsham. Plus a selection of poems by Sally Evans and Tara Goegjen. Finally, an interview with Dick Blau discussing his 44 year project documenting his family, Thicker than Water.

You can check out issue four HERE.