John Gossage and Guido Guidi at SAGE Gallery, Paris

If you happen to live in Paris or plan on visiting, there is still a chance to see the Gossage / Guidi show at SAGE Gallery. The show opened in November and runs until February 9.

Sage says this: We are proud to present an important group of vintage photographs by John Gossage and Guido Guidi which is part of a 25 years dialogue between the two friends. As Guido claims, John Gossage and him are brothers who, as neither of them know the language of the other, speak only "photography".  When you look at their work you immediately understand why. Their work is always about the importance of what goes unnoticed, about what remain unseen until they call your attention to it. They both resonate with a rare emotional, esthetical and poetical purity. As Guido Guidi said : « The spirit lies in simplicity not rhetoric.

SAGE Paris 1 bis, avenue de Lowendal, 75007 Paris, France. Gallery website HERE.

Gerry Badger - takes a reactionary tack

Last October in Denmark for the superb Aarhus Photobook festival (link HERE) I was able to have several extended conversations on the nature of photography with Gerry Badger. Gerry is probably the most informed writer and commentator on the medium I have ever come across. His views are stridently opinionated and not to be easily dismissed. Gerry divides photography practice into two opposing camps. On one hand authentic hard-won work coming from the artist's heart and head. And the other pretentious wow look at me, ego based, I want to be famous sort of work. Needles to say I'm with Gerry and go 100% with the authentic.

I came across a piece on Gerry Badger's website (you can go there HERE) which further develops this debate. In essence Gerry firmly supports documentary or straight photography. And I agree, for two reasons, First, there is more than enough magic and mystery in the world on our doorsteps, to keep all of us shooting for several lifetimes. Second, the contrived and the overly conceptual mostly seems to come pre-loaded with a goodly dose of ego and pretentious posturing. Don't get me wrong here, there is a lot of rubbish documentary work being made just as there is some worthy highly conceptual work.

In a preamble to a piece on Michael Schmidt's bookwork Waffenruhe Gerry expands on these thoughts: 
For the serious photographer with a confirmed belief in the artistic worth of ‘straight’ photography – the so-called ‘poetic documentary’ mode – these are trying times. More than ever, most of the world seems to think that the simple photograph is not enough. The photographic artist who still stubbornly works within the broad tradition of Atget or Weston, even Frank or Friedlander, is deemed wilfully anachronistic, a member of a mutated, almost extinct species. 

 The straight photographer certainly is an endangered species. Reviled either openly or covertly, and frequently passed over in favour of those utilising the medium for conspicuously more grandiose ends. These days, the straight photographer’s nominally modest, ‘unambitious’ tend to be swamped by the serried ranks of vainglorious photofabrications and moronic pieces of minimalist conceptualism masquerading as the ‘real thing.’ For example, in a recent exhibition shown in France and England, Another Objectivity, the work of the American ‘New Topographer’ Robert Adams – relatively smallscale, subtle, complex – looked like a fish out of water amidst the welter of overblown, vacuous variations on undergraduate themes that were purporting to make us ponder issues of ‘art’, ‘culture’, and ‘representation.’ Adams – unfashionably, daringly – seemed more concerned with life than with art. 

 Of course, I an deliberately oversimplifying the issue. I also wish that is were unnecessary to take such a reactionary tack, but I feel that a little revisionism is in order. An artist’ medium should not be the ground for value judgements and ideological conflict. The art, yes – the medium itself, no. Yet that is precisely what has happened, and what is happening with photography. Certain ideological applications of photographic processes, namely, where the primacy of the photograph is denigrated and challenged, are held to be superior to the documentary utilisation of the medium. The photo-hybrid – photopainting, photosculpture, the ubiquitous conceptual photo ‘piece’ – is seen as the only valid notional approach. There are signs of active discrimination against the straight photograph and the plainly veristic practice from both within and without the photographic enclave. 

Yet, so many of those seeking to ‘extend the boundaries of the medium’, and refute the ‘hegemony of the documentary’, are fooling themselves. Whether deliberately or unknowingly (often the latter I suspect), they would seek to deny photography’s salient strengths and replace them with a diluted academicism. Much of what they trot forth as shining examples of the medium’s cutting edge are simply tired old ideas (intellectually kosher ideas, to be sure) wrapped in glossy new packages and bound with accompanying rhetoric. Invariably – lots of rhetoric.

I write this rather bitter preamble by way of a new book by one of Germany’s leading photographer – Michael Schmidt. I have been cheered immensely by the appearance of Waffenruhe (Ceasefire), and hope that it might rekindle the spirit in any straight photographer whose faith might be waning. For Schmidt confirms that photography certainly can be enough, a medium rich in allusion, visual surprise, and narrative quality when utilised by an intelligent mind’s eye. Furthermore, Waffenruhe reiterates a fact that has long seemed blindingly apparent to the more discerning photographer, that photographs must be put together like words, or individual movie frames, in order to sing their full song. It advocates persuasively that the most effective form of presentation for the straight photograph is probably the book. A vessel for the poetically juxtaposed sequence of images, the book becomes the primary artwork, rather then the necessarily less concentrated row of prints on a gallery wall.

5 Best Photobooks 2018 - my selection

Given the prolific volume of photobooks published every year it's impossible to get an complete overview of what's out there. However here are five new books that struck me and now sit comfortably in my photobook library. If there is a factor common to each of these books it's on one level the authenticity of the approach, images made from heart and head. And secondly all firmly coming from a documentary tradition. 

Paul Kooiker’s EGGS AND RARITIES is an“encyclopaedia of life” in 164 images. This ambitious but utopian project reads like a sampler of photographic genres: landscape, nude, still life, etc. To achieve this, Kooiker often uses clichés more reminiscent of the propaganda of tourist brochures or of religious and political rhetoric in the media. 

John Gossage LOOKING UP BEN JAMES. This is a book of photographs first and foremost, by an endlessly experimental photographer. He is essentially a street photographer, a flâneur with an emphasis upon the urban landscape, although that does not begin to describe the range or depth of his practice. Gossage has developed into one of the most recognisable photographic voices over the years, and that can mean resorting – quite naturally, all artists do it – to a repertory of stylistic and contextual devices, that go to make up his distinctive voice. I know his work intimately, so I am very aware of his little strategies and visual foibles, but I can also say that, like a good jazz improviser, he is always trying to surprise himself, and come up with a picture that one has never quite seen before. Gerry Badger 

Gerry Johansson DEUTSCHLAND SUPPLEMENT...They’re unique experiences, quite unlike most of what is going on in the world of contemporary photography. Everything about them feels extremely carefully considered, yet there is a lightness to them that is quite rare. Jörg M. Colberg 

In “Waffenruhe” Michael Schmidt brings together surprising combinations of images to express a generation’s dystopian sense of life shortly before the fall of the Wall. Schmidt evokes a world of ruptures and absences that eschews a confident, comprehensive point of view. Tipi Bookshop

In Domesticated Land, Susan Lipper navigates an apocalyptic world poised between inertia and the end of mankind, somewhere in the California desert. Uncannily tranquil, the landscape offers a trans-historical litany of monuments, icons and signs from which the author and protagonist constructs a narrative interspersed with the words of historic and contemporary women. Putting female subjectivity into relief, Lipper obfuscates the romantic notion of the desert as a land of freedom and self-enlightenment. A lone snake, a dilapidated home, the remains of a cinematic stage set, the head of a fallen woman, a military base, barbed wire: such facts create fiction, and one that serves as an unnerving political admonition concerning the current state of America. Mack Books

Martin Parr - "most of what I take is crap"

In a short but inspirational video, (go to it HERE) Martin Parr dispenses some solid advice to an unnamed group of students. Parr talks about the need for passion and obsession, how there is no place to hide in photography. The need to build connections with a subject. Finding ones voice and a unique visual language. Learning from others mistakes.

Parr notes that most things that happen in the world we miss. He reveals that most of what he takes is crap, (fuck, I thought it was only me). And that you have to take a lot of crap pictures to trawl through in order to get to something half decent. Then you have to learn to know the difference between the crap and the good. Pictures he says have to be powerful enough so that they can work on their own.

Finally, Parr talks of the creative demise of photographers who used to be great but half got lazy and fall back on past achievements. He doesn't mention names. Mmmmmm let's think...

If you have 6 minutes to spare watch this video, it will either cheer you up or send you into a deep funk.

You can go to Martin Parr's website HERE.

Martin Parr is a chronicler of our age. In the face of the constantly growing flood of images released by the media, his photographs offer us the opportunity to see the world from his unique perspective. At first glance, his photographs seem exaggerated or even grotesque. The motifs he chooses are strange, the colours are garish and the perspectives are unusual. Parr’s term for the overwhelming power of published images is “propaganda”. He counters this propaganda with his own chosen weapons: criticism, seduction and humour. As a result, his photographs are original and entertaining, accessible and understandable. But at the same time they show us in a penetrating way how we live, how we present ourselves to others, and what we value. Leisure, consumption and communication are the concepts that this British photographer has been researching for several decades now on his worldwide travels. In the process, he examines national characteristics and international phenomena to find out how valid they are as symbols that will help future generations to understand our cultural peculiarities. Parr enables us to see things that have seemed familiar to us in a completely new way. In this way he creates his own image of society, which allows us to combine an analysis of the visible signs of globalisation with unusual visual experiences. In his photos, Parr juxtaposes specific images with universal ones without resolving the contradictions. Individual characteristics are accepted and eccentricities are treasured. The themes Parr selects and his inimitable treatment of them set him apart as a photographer whose work involves the creation of extensive series. Part of his unusual strategy is to present and publish the same photos in the context of art photography, in exhibitions and in art books, as well as in the related fields of advertising and journalism. In this way, he transcends the traditional separation of the different types of photography. Thanks to this integrative approach, as well as his style and his choice of themes, he has long served as a model for the younger generation of photographers. Martin Parr sensitises our subconscious – and once we’ve seen his photographs, we keep on discovering these images over and over again in our daily lives and recognising ourselves within them. The humour in these photographs makes us laugh at ourselves, with a sense of recognition and release. Thomas Weski

Paris Photo - The Interviews

In Paris Photo's Christmas mailing they included a link to 43 short but superb interviews with many of todays leading camera artists. 

Paris Photo said this: we invite you to follow Paris Photo online with the Agenda featuring the latest events of our partnering galleries and institutions across the globe, the Interviews with in-depth look at photography with today’s leading artists, or catch what you missed at the fair with videos and podcasts from the 2018 edition.

I've just looked at a few of the interviews, they are short and sweet and well worth a look. Agnes Varda for example who states simply I try to be honest about what I speak about. Mitch Epstein, to take the strange and exceptional... to see it with clarity. Roger Ballen, birds link the heavens to the earth.

What seemed to be common to all the interviews was a sense of down to earth honesty and humility. There were no pretentious attempts talk up the work with bullshit art-speak, a strategy usually employed by lesser artists.

The Paris Photo link is HERE. Go for it.

Sally Mann - A Thousand Crossings at The Getty

Sally Mann - A Thousand Crossings at The Getty Center. 
For more than forty years, Sally Mann (American, born in 1951) has made experimental and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: family, desire, mortality, memory, and nature’s indifference to the human condition. Her broad body of work is all bred of a place, the American South. A native of Lexington, Virginia, Mann has long examined the tension between her devotion to the region and her awareness of its fraught past. Her photographs pose provocative questions about identity, history, race, and spirituality. This exhibition considers how the legacy of the South—as both homeland and graveyard, refuge and battleground—has shaped the artist’s career and continues to inform the American experience. 
The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts and runs until February 10. 

There is an excellent an extensive overview of Sally Mann's practice on the The Getty site. This covers her early work photographing her her three children - Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia - at the family’s remote summer cabin in the Shenandoah Valley, in western Virginia. She primarily used a large 8 × 10 inch camera to convey the detail and texture of everyday life.  The text concludes with commentary on the pictures Mann has made of her husband, Larry, since they met in 1969. In the early 2000s Mann began to document the transformations to his body caused by muscular dystrophy. She called this series Proud Flesh, a term for the scar tissue that forms over a horse’s wounds.

Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of America’s most renowned photographers. She has received numerous awards, including NEA, NEH, and Guggenheim Foundation grants, and her work is held by major institutions internationally. Her many books include At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994), What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), Proud Flesh (2009), The Flesh and the Spirit (2010), Remembered Light (2016) and Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings (2018). In 2001 Mann was named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time magazine. A 1994 documentary about her work, Blood Ties, was nominated for an Academy Award and the 2006 feature film What Remains was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2008. Her bestselling memoir, Hold Still (Little, Brown, 2015), received universal critical acclaim, and was named a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2016 Hold Still won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. The National Gallery of Art presented a critically lauded show, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings, in 2018. Comprised of 109 prints and several videos, A Thousand Crossings addresses complex issues relating to the American South and will travel internationally until the beginning of 2020. Mann is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York. She lives in Virginia.

You can go to The Getty site HERE and Sally Mann's website HERE.

Simon Roberts at FLOWERS NYC Chelsea Gallery

2011, Clevedon Pier #B, Somerset

If you happen to be in New York you've got until January 12 to catch Simon Roberts show Homeland at FLOWERS Chelsea space.

FLOWERS say this: Flowers Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by British photographer Simon Roberts, bringing together works from his extended photographic surveys of Russia and Britain produced over a period of 15 years. Simon Roberts is known for his major bodies of work, We English, Pierdom, and Merrie Albion, which together comprise one of the most significant contemporary photographic studies of Britain since the new color documentary of the 1980s. His earlier series Motherland remains one of the most extensive, comprehensive photographic accounts of Russia by a Western photographer. Presented together in this exhibition, Homeland explores Roberts’ critical reflection on the relationship between contemporary national identity and place, and his ongoing investigation of what draws people together within a particular landscape. Between 2004 and 2005 Roberts traveled to more than 200 locations across Russia to produce the book Motherland (2007), an exploration of the relationship between landscape and Russian identity. His photographic studies explored ideas of Russia’s ‘modest beauty’* and presented a diverse view of the vast country, encapsulating the optimism and national pride derived from the Russian sense of place. 
On his return to Britain, Roberts began to examine the British relationship to the idea of homeland, which he came to define as a sense of longing sustained by “a range of archetypal images held in the mind”. The resulting photographs, which were produced over a decade (2007-2017), adopt a historical, rather than fleeting, gaze. Exploring social practices and customs linked to the British landscape, as well as some of the economic and political theater that has helped define recent history, his large-scale photographs reflect on the nature of shared histories and communal experiences. Critically conflating the traditional genre of landscape with social documentary, Roberts typically positions the camera at a deliberate distance and elevation from the most obvious scenic viewpoint, focusing instead on the sidelines or peripheral spaces, rewarding the viewer’s closer scrutiny of the scene with subtle actions and gestures taking place off-center. Paradoxically theatrical and ordinary, Roberts’ images reach beyond the news headlines relating to ‘how we are’ in our present societies and excavate the breadth of diverse individual experience making up a national identity.

You can go to FLOWERS website HERE and Simon Roberts HERE.

2005, Untitled 15, Murmansk Harbour, Northern Russia

2011, Teignmouth Grand Pier, Devon, July

2008, Keynes Country Park Beach, Shornecote, Gloucestershire

THIS LONG CENTURY - A Decade of Insights

THIS LONG CENTURY is an ever-evolving collection of personal insights from artists, authors, filmmakers, musicians and cultural icons the world over. Bringing together such intimate work as sketchbooks, personal memorabilia, annotated typescripts, short essays, home movies and near impossible to find archival work, THIS LONG CENTURY serves as a direct line to the contributors themselves. 

2018 marked a decade of THIS LONG CENTURY. An epic ten years, with 380 unique and personal contributions from significant creative producers in a multitude of disciplines and places. TLC is a  low key affair with no ads, no grants, or fundraisers. Word of mouth keeps it going.

You can go to the THIS LONG CENTURY site HERE. And you can follow THIS LONG CENTURY on Instagram HERE.

Contributor No 2 - Collier Schorr

— I was talking to a friend about a scene in Full Metal Jacket and he said “that is my favourite war movie”. Later, I thought, what does that mean? What does a favourite war movie satisfy? What makes it so desirable? All narrative cinema pivots on the transformation of a protagonist and so most war movies satisfy this requirement in spades. From An Officer and a Gentleman to Platoon, the young soldier is transformed into a man, either ruined by brutality or recused by structure, there is a simple pleasure in watching someone (other than oneself) abused into a potential killing machine. 

Contributor No 31 - Hellen Van Meene

And as to being in a fright,
Allow me to remark
That Ghosts have just as good a right
In every way, to fear the light,
As Men to fear the dark.
“Phantasmagoria,” Lewis Carrol

Contributor No 105 - John Gossage

This post is in the hope that the dead finally have decent internet access.
FOR WALTER HOPPS, who taught me so much.

Contributor No 150 - Robert Breer

— A short while ago, my son-law Vhannes Koujanian and my daughter Sophie came to visit us on a too rare occasion. Early in their visit I was telling Vhannes about my habit over many years of getting up early to avoid the morning rush hour on my way to teach at Cooper Union in New York and about getting dressed in the dark to avoid waking up my wife Kate. I bragged that in fact, though long retired, I still do get dressed before sun-up!
He said “I KNOW!”
Surprised, I said “HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?”
He said “LOOK AT YOUR SHOES!”

I looked down and saw that I was wearing two distinctly different shoes!

Contributor No 160 - Saul Leiter

— I am very fond of my sketchbooks that I began in the 50s and still work on today. I think there is a certain freedom when you are absorbed in painting a sketchbook. You are not burdened to do something important. You are not dealing in big things. You are just thinking and the sketchbooks are a way to express your thinking. They are very intimate. I work on my sketchbooks almost every day. If I had to choose what I value the most in my work I might choose my sketchbooks. Here are two of my favorite sketchbooks. There are four here which are just covers titled, My Father and I. The other is Sketchbook #1 which I hope to publish as a book one day. Some of my sketchbooks will be on display at my show at the Deichtorhallen House of Photography, Hamburg in February 2012.

JR at the MEP, Paris

JR Momentum, the mechanics of the race, curated by Jean-Luc Monterosso, is possibly Monterosso's last show at the European House of Photography before new director Simon Baker shares his vision at the MEP. This show is the first major exhibition of JR's work within a French institution. It brings together the artist's first photographs, monumental format collages of his biggest projects, and several new installations.

The exhibit showcases many projects, inviting visitors to lose themselves into JR's creative process, by retracing his first shots when he followed a group of graffiti artists in Paris in the early 2000s, as well as his first pastings. The show also goes back on his major series: Portrait of a Generation (an illegal pasting exhibition of portraits taken with a 28 mm lens); Women Are Heroes (that pays tribute to those who play an essential role in society but who are the primary victims of wars and conflicts); The Wrinkles of the City (a world scale project presented in various cities around the world where 'wrinkles', human as well as architectural, can be found) ; Unframed (in which JR reinterprets works by other photographers, giving them a new meaning by taking them out of their original context). The exhibit unveils for the first time in Europe an interactive mural about guns in America. In all, JR filmed and photographed 245 people - hunters and activists, teachers and police officers, parents and children - to create this mural for TIME's November 5, 2018, cover. Visitors are able to discover the mural in a unique way thanks to an online platform especially developed for the event.

The exhibition is showing currently and finishes February 10.

JR and Agnes Varda at The Lincoln Center

As noteworthy is the 2017 film where 89 year old Agnes Varda collaborated with 34 year old JR on a remarkable new documentary titled Faces Places. In the film they journey from one rural French village to another, meeting people, taking photographs, and printing the images super large-scale to be placed grandly within the environments they encountered. Following a screening of Faces Places at the 55th New York Film Festival, the two artist friends discussed their unique project and the wise and wonderful film that came out of it. You can see The Lincoln Center conversation HERE.

You can go to JR's website HERE and the MEP HERE.

Photographers whose work I like - No34/ Julia De Cooker

Recently I had the pleasure of meeting French photographer Julia De Cooker who was in Auckland looking for a lab to process a mountain of film she had shot while traveling to NZ through the Pacific. Julia kindly gave me a copy of her bookwork An Artificial Life published by Kehrer in 2017. The work is really good. Julia has a quiet sensibility and uncertainty that all the best artists have, she makes compelling images from the heart and the head. There is no, wow I'm really clever look at me here.

Julia was born in Paris in 1988 and graduated in Visual Communication/Photography at ECAL, Lausanne, Switzerland in 2012. She is based in Paris.

Below is a selection of Julia's images from an An Artificial Life, I'm sure you will agree this is stand-out work. You can go to Julia's website HERE.