Hippolyte Bayard

RearViewMirror

2012-01-11T10:57:00.008+01:00

"Credo di aver sempre combattuto dall’interno, con il mio lavoro, il genere documentario. La macchina fotografica legge il mondo in maniera letterale, eppure il mondo è tutt’altro che semplice o trasparente. Il terrorismo, la nuove strategie della guerra moderna, il confronto culturale tra una forza di occupazione e il suo nemico, l’idea di martirio nell’estremismo islamico, l’impalpabilità del conflitto dell’est del Congo, sono tutti argomenti molto difficili da indagare con i tradizionali strumenti del realismo documentario."

Il 20 gennaio uscirà il numero 7 di RVM - RearViewMirror Magazine, nel quale comincio una collaborazione con la rivista di fotografia documentaria edita da Postcart Edizioni con un'intervista con Richard Mosse, che ha appena pubblicato la sua prima monografia Infra con Aperture. Il nuovo numero di RVM ha come titolo "How hard can we push?", una selezione di lavori che declinano diversi modi di arrivare a una qualche forma di limite, che siano le esistenze che raccontano, i luoghi che mostrano o i linguaggi che usano, come il Congo virato in rosa e rosso delle immagini di Mosse, che nell'intervista racconta come è giunto a questa forma di estremismo cromatico, insieme a alcune riflessioni sulla fotografia e il genere documentario.

"I guess in all my work I have consistently struggled against the documentary genre, from the inside. The camera’s dumb optic is intensely literal, yet the world is far from being simple. Air disasters, terrorism, the simulated nature of modern warfare, the martyr drive in Islamic extremism, the intangibility of Eastern Congo’s conflict – these are all subjects that are very difficult to express with traditional, documentary realism."

Issue #7 of RVM - RearViewMirror Magazine will be out on January 20, in which I begin collaborating with the magazine of documentary photography published by Postcart with an interview with Richard Mosse, who has just published his first monograph Infra with Aperture. The latest issue of RVM is titled "How hard can we push?", featuring a selction of works exploring different ways of pushing the boundaries, whether it is about the lives they depict, the places they show or the language they use - like the pink and red-toned Congo in Mosse's images, who in the interview tells us how he got to this form of chromatic extremism and shares his thoughts about the documentary genre.

Fotoromanzo Italiano

2011-12-29T11:31:00.007+01:00

Si racconta che l'ex segretario di Stato americano Henry Kissinger una volta abbia detto che per quanto fosse in grado di decifrare le oscure manovre del Cremlino, trovava impossibile comprendere le logiche della politica italiana.

Questo spiegherebbe lo smarrimento di molti nell'orientarsi tra le immagini contenute in Fotoromanzo Italiano, un archivio non ortodossso sulla storia e la cultura di massa del Bel Paese creato da cinque fotografi (Andrea Botto, Giorgio Barrera, Marco Citron, Maurizio Montagna e Marco Signorini).

"fotoromanzo italiano
è un progetto artistico in progress_
una riflessione sulla fotografia e sull'uso dell'immagine, oggi_
alle radici del nostro presente_
per costruire un immaginario_
o solo per rivelare un'illusione_

fotoromanzoitaliano.it è l'azione 1_"

Buon anno a tutti voi.

It is told that former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said that while he was able to read into the obscure manoeuvres orchestrated within the Kremlin, he was helpless trying to understand the logics of Italian politics.

That would explain why you might find yourself wondering how to connect all the images gathered inside Fotoromanzo Italiano, an unorthodox archive about Italian history and mass culture started by five photographers (Andrea Botto, Giorgio Barrera, Marco Citron, Maurizio Montagna and Marco Signorini).

"fotoromanzo italiano
is an artistic project in progress_
an exploration about photography and the use of the image, today_
at the roots of our present_
to build up an imaginary_
or just to reveal an illusion_

fotoromanzoitaliano.it is action no. 1_"

Happy New Year to you all.

Chasing a land

2011-12-23T15:50:00.008+01:00

© Filippo Brancoli Pantera

"QD è un progetto collettivo in progress iniziato il 21 marzo 2011 e realizzato da 15 fotografi distribuiti su tutto il territorio italiano.
Gli autori intendono esplorare e raccontare in parallelo il proprio ambito urbano in una sorta di diario in cui le cifre stilistiche personali tendono a sfumare in uno sguardo comune e in cui le riflessioni sul fare fotografia si affiancano e si intrecciano alle immagini stesse."

Creato da Tommaso Perfetti, QD è un nuovo tentativo di contenere in una ricerca la complessità del paesaggio e dello spazio abitato d'Italia, un insieme di mondi distanti che più sfugge alla comprensione, più spinge a nuove imprese per cercare di afferrarlo.

Gabriele Rossi, Marcello Mariana e Filippo Brancoli Pantera sono alcuni tra i fotografi coinvolti nel progetto.

© Gabriele Rossi

"QD is a collective project in progress launched on March 21, 2011 and made by 15 photographers located all over the Italian territory. The authors aim at exploring and depicting in parallel their respective urban environment, creating a diary in which the individual styles blur into a common gaze, and in which thoughts about making photography intertwine with the images themselves."

Created by Tommaso Perfetti, QD is a new attempt to try to encompass the complexity of Italy's landscape and inhabited space - an elusive subject which the more it escapes comprehension, the more it pushes to new efforts to grasp it.

Gabriele Rossi, Marcello Mariana and Filippo Brancoli Pantera are among the photographers involved in the project.

© Marcello Mariana

Comparative photography

2011-12-22T11:07:00.016+01:00

Michael Marten, Bedruthan Steps, Cornwall, 25 and 31 August 2007, High water 4.30pm, low water 2pm

"Sea Change is a study of the tides round the coast of Britain. The views in each diptych are taken from identical positions at low tide and high tide, usually 6 or 18 hours apart."

"Recent landscape photography often focuses on human shaping (and reshaping) of the environment - urbanisation, globalisation, pollution. Even when critical and committed, this approach can emphasise, even glamorise, humankind's power over nature. I'm interested in rediscovering nature's own powers: the elemental forces and processes that underlie and shape the planet".

- Michael Marten

Michael Marten, Harbour-Berwickshire, 22 August 2005. Low water 11am, high water 6pm

Marten describes his work as an example of 'comparative photography', "where two or more images show changes in time (or other dimensions)". He then makes the example of Nicholas Nixon's The Brown Sisters, a work I confess I did not know, a thirty-year-long series of portraits of Nixon's wife with her three sisters, which I think is the closest thing to a New Topographics of the heart.

David Prifti | 1961 - 2011

2011-12-21T10:31:00.013+01:00

Last October I wrote to a group of photographers to ask them to be part of what would have become the latest issue of Unless You Will, which editor Heidi Romano has released online at the beginning of December. With Heidi we decided to work on a selection of artists using alternative photographic processes and my thought went immediately to David Prifti, who created beautiful images using the wet collodion and the liquid emulsion techniques.

He never got back to me, until his wife Monika wrote to me earlier this month to let me know that David passed away after a two-year battle with pancreatic cancer. Had I searched for more news about David I would have found out earlier that Monika had been writing a blog with updates about his conditions since the beginning of his treatment, and I would have read about all the support by his relatives, his students, his peers.

Even though his work could not be included in the magazine, I like to think that Unless You Will #19 is dedicated to his memory and his art, and our selection would remain incomplete without a look into David's fascinating world.

The Cave of Many Colours

2011-12-19T11:17:00.011+01:00

Brice Bischoff, Bronson Caves, 2009

Bronson Caves is the name of a series of photographs by New Orleans-born artist Brice Bischoff, where he records with long exposures performances executed in front of the homonimous caves in the Griffith Park in California, also home of the famous Hollywood sign on Mount Lee. Bischoff stages acts involving large coloured cardboards, which thanks to the long exposures become blurred mass of colours lingering in the air in front of the famous site.

Brice Bischoff, Bronson Caves, 2009

Cast & crew on unknown western in Bronson Canyon, with the Hollywood sign in the background

Over the decades the Bronson Caves have been the setting of countless movies and TV shows, mostly science fiction and western films, turning them into some kind of deposit of collective memories and fantasies (Bischoff himself provides us a list of movies shot in the caves in his blog - more info also here). Bischoff's images sum up perfectly the cave's iconic status, showing them as if they were inhabited by ghosts of colour, shapeless creatures created by our hazy childhood memories.

The Batmobile in front of Bat Cave, aka Bronson Caves, used in the Batman TV series. Front cover of The Explorer, August 2004

European drama

2011-12-17T11:29:00.008+01:00

Nicolas Dhervillers could be easily considered as the French version of Gregory Crewdson, sharing with the American superstar the same cinematographic light in scenes where characters wander or look around themselves surrounded by an eerie scenery.

But while Crewdson is mostly devoted to convey a certain kind of suburban angst and loneliness, Dhervillers is more interested in working on the layers of representation that can hide inside an image: his photographs from the series My sentimental archives and Tourists consists of old photographs and snapshots merged with new landscapes made by him, fused together by lighting and digital manipulation.

All images © Nicolas Dhervillers

instant collection

2011-11-30T13:25:00.011+01:00

Sono lieto di annunciare la mia nuova collaborazione con ars-imago per il progetto instant collection, una serie di mostre che si terranno nella neonata ars-imago gallery all'interno della loro sede di Roma. Abbiamo chiesto a un gruppo di fotografi di realizzare dei lavori ex-novo utilizzando le pellicole The Impossible Project, sfidandoli a scoprire che cosa succede alla loro fotografia quando abbandonano i loro strumenti abituali per la bellezza imprevedibile della pellicola istantanea.

Il primo della lista sarà Alessandro Imbriaco con valitutti, un diario intimo nel quale veniamo guidati attraverso un paesaggio in continuo movimento fatto di vita quotidiana e memorie, tracce del passato e frammenti di presente.

La mostra sarà inaugurata il 2 dicembre alle ore 19.00.

I prossimi appuntamenti saranno con Marco Zanta a febbraio e Massimo Siragusa a aprile.

Alessandro Imbriaco, valitutti - 2 dicembre 2011 - 20 gennaio 2012.
ars-imago gallery, Via degli Scipioni 24-26 - Roma.

I am glad to announce my new collaboration with my friends and analog paladins from ars-imago on the instant collection project, a series of exhibitions which will be hosted in the newborn ars-imago gallery at their headquarter in Rome. We have invited a group of photographers to produce a brand new work expressly for the ars-imago gallery using The Impossible Project films, challenging them to find out what happens to their photography when they drop their familiar tools and embrace the unpredictable beauty of the instant film.

The first artist in line is Alessandro Imbriaco with the work valitutti, an intense private diary where we are guided through the shifting landscape of daily life and personal memories, traces from the past and fragments of today.

The show will open on December 2 at 7pm local time.

The following exhibitions will be Marco Zanta in February and Massimo Siragusa in April.

Stay tuned!

All images © Alessandro Imbriaco

Waste Land

2011-11-24T18:05:00.007+01:00

Pieter Hugo will be in Rome on November 30 (6pm local time) to hold a lecture at MAXXI - National Museum of the 21st Century Art ahead of the opening of an exhibition of his latest work, Permanent Error, a series of portraits and landscapes taken in a dump site of e-waste near the slum of Agbogbloshie, in Ghana.

Like a dark mirror of our daily life and all our beloved technological extensions, this work shows us a ground zero of dry land and clouds of smoke, filled by creatures that could come from Hugo's previous work about Nigeria's fim industry, Nollywood - except they're not. This time they are real people, and what is unreal is the fact that they are in that place, covered with all those rusted and alien objects, while toxic smoke rises up the sky, and some cows inexplicably manage to stroll around peacefully or lie on the ground asleep, maybe dreaming of a different world.

Permanent Error will be at MAXXI from December 1st, 2011, to April 29, 2012.

All images taken from Permanent Error © Pieter Hugo

The bubble chamber

2011-11-18T10:29:00.015+01:00

The caption next to the wall shown above, from the exhibition Of Large and Small at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, says:

"The pictures were taken in a 2 metre long bubble chamber in CERN in Switzerland in 1967. They were used for studying so-called strong interactions at proton clashes with the - at that time - very highest energy level. At this time one began to understand that protons themselves were built from smaller parts, and on pictures it is possible to see a number of particles created by the clashes."

I think it is safe to say that these are among the most interesting traces ever left on film since the birth of photography (btw, today is Daguerre's birthday).

See for yourself:

And if you want some more, you only have to ask.

Written in sand

2011-11-17T09:23:00.009+01:00

Dornith Doherty, Seed Head 2, 2010

Dornith Doherty's photography is devoted to the investigations of the variety, the resourcefulness and the fragility of the plant kingdom, and of the natural environment extensively. She especially focuses on the struggle to preserve nature's diversity, shown through a beautiful combination of microphotographs of plant seeds and a images showing the interiors of seed banks around the world.

Dornith Doherty, Drying Seeds and Pliers, Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, 2009

Before that, she made several photographic series, like Altered Terrain and Constructed Landscapes, where for example she combines still lives made of natural specimens with projections of photographs of the places where these were collected.

Dornith Doherty, After the Rain, 2005

Her mini dioramas bear a striking resemblance with Abelardo Morell's latest update of his Camera Obscura work, called Tent Camera, in which he photographs the projection coming through the pinhole and falling on the ground.

Abelardo Morell, Tent-Camera Image On Ground: View of Cerro Castellan and Tuff Canyon. Big Bend National Park, Texas, 2010

Contingency plans

2011-11-05T09:39:00.010+01:00

Fresh from a G20 summit which failed to agree on a plan to arrest the ongoing global recession, and in the middle of the various "Occupy" protests happening in different cities, I ran into Immo Klink and his project Security, which shows the deployment of police forces during international meetings of heads of state and summits alike. I especially like the night photographs, where policemen become like menacing fireflies scattered all over, thanks to the clever use of a flashlight, while the Gleneagles series shows them in the middle of the green of the countryside, looking a bit lost, as if somebody threw them in the middle of it, while they are still trying to figure out where they are.

Klink has another project called European Communities, a hommage to those communities living in nature in makeshift houses (or not, some are quite remarkable and solid), divided in three chapters: Shelter, Life, Dwellers. This adds another series to the survey of photographic works about shelters I have ben doing recently - see previous chapters here, here and here.

People living in shelters among the woods on one side, police everywhere on the other: is this man trying to predict Europe's near future?

All images © Immo Klink

Dispatches from Denmark

2011-10-25T09:47:00.012+02:00

Peter Funch, Joy and Waste, 2011

Two more exhibitions I saw in Copenhagen:

- The Fotografisk Center is hosting Myths of the Near Future - New Danish Photography, a group show of 11 Danish photographers, including household names like Joakim Eskildsen and Jacob Aue Sobol and less internationally established names with really interesting work, like Lykke Andersen, with what I would describe as her conceptual vistas, revolving on the conflict between real and artificial, culture and nature; Peter Funch with his beautifully (and funny) staged street photography, or Astrid Kruse, whose images look like pages from spooky candlelight tales.

Lykke Anderson, Cows #1, 2011

The exhibition itself maybe presents too many names and too little work by each artist (it has around 2 photographs each), but the photographs and the gallery space are definitely worth the visit.

- The Fotografisk Center's exhibition also had two images by Trine Søndergaard and Nicolai Howalt's How to Hunt (above), which last year was released in a book by Hatje Cantz. Howalt was also on show at Martin Asbaek Gallery (I literally saw the last 15 minutes of the exhibition on the closing date) with his latest work Slutninger, images of human ashes after cremation which Howalt photographed to draw a parallel with the dust scattering into space after the explosion caused by the death of a star.

The work is presented in its two formats, with very large murals paired with small prints. The images feel very different in the two different formats, and I find the large ones simply far too large, clashing with a physical limited perception of detail (read overblown) when watching the prints from a close distance, while the smaller prints preserve the analogy with the stardust, as no matter how close we look at them them, it always feels like there is more to discover among those constellations of human remains.

Nicolai Howalt, Slutninger nr 3, 2011

Or maybe this dichotomy is exactly what Howalt wanted to show: "When a human being dies, the functions of the organism cease and rigor mortis sets in after a few hours; if the choice after this is a cremation, the body is burned at about 900o. The ash from this, which consists of about two kilos of elements, is at first gathered in a zinc box. An inorganic and non-degradable mass which in terms of the original paradoxically contains an infinity and an independent being in the universe. But if the zinc box is emptied and the elements for example come into contact with soil, they will once more enter into new compounds – in a new cycle."

Behind a desk

2011-10-21T12:15:00.003+02:00

The Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, formerly the Nikolaj Church (fascinating reconversion), is currently hosting an interesting exhibition, Bureaucratics by Dutch photographer Jan Banning, a journey through hundreds of state civil administrations across eight countries, showing how much the same recurrent image of a person sitting behind his or her own office desk can reveal of the country that those people are supposed to serve.

In Texas you might have two embalmed deers looking over your shoulder during your daily duties, in France you might work for a 51 residents' community, in Liberia you might be a policeman with no phone, no car and earn 15 euros a month.

All images except installation views © Jan Banning

'City by the Sea'

2011-10-20T12:07:00.001+02:00

What do Sexual Healing by Marvin Gaye and Karl Marx's Manifesto of the Communist Party have in common? They were written in the same place, Ostend, a coastal city in Belgium where Victor Hugo and Arthur Rimbaud also spent some time of their life.

Photographer Stefan Vanthuyne left Ostend when he was eighteen, at a time where the place was descending into what he calls 'a downward spiral', losing its mundane life and becoming a melancholic 'last stop'. His City by the Sea is a revisitation of Ostend today, a visual exploration where his personal memories flow through the roads and the buildings like a cold salty wind.

'Baby I got sick this morning

A sea was storming inside of me

Baby I think I'm capsizing

The waves are rising and rising'

It's easy to imagine Marvin Gaye writing those lyrics while looking from his window on a rainy winter day, while the sun has been hiding behind thick clouds for weeks and weeks.

All images © Stefan Vanthuyne

Painting with numbers

2011-10-18T15:45:00.002+02:00

It has been a long time since I last mentioned Mathieu Bernard-Reymond on these pages, and he has been producing some excellent work over the last few years. One remarkable series is Monuments, a sequence of black and white images in which Reymond transformed financial charts and other kinds of statistics into physical objects placed in the landscape, shown as pieces of land art or as memorials (just a remainder: check this old post to find a strikingly similar work by Michael Najjar).

Monuments perfectly represents Reymond's idea of photography, the contamination of a consolidated tradition of natural and urban landscape with a highly sophisticated use of digital manipulation. The goal is to create a new level of vision, where the openly unreal content of the image is presented in such a realistic fashion that it becomes plausible.

The use of digital made by Bernard-Reymond is one of the best examples of how photography can finally learn to stop worrying and love it once and for all, setting aside speculations on which should be the truest form of the photographic image and using digital as the instrument allowing the photographer to imagine a photograph and then proceed to create it as freely as possible from physical constraints.

Photography has often been naively described as the act of using a paintbrush of light, but perhaps with Bernard-Reymond we have one of those cases where the definition finally fits, as his images share the clinical precision of details we ascribe to photography, and yet they take us to a different dimension, where the world as we know it is silently reinvented.

All images © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond

Danish Prospects

2011-10-12T00:45:00.002+02:00

Christen Købke, View Outside the North Gate of the Citadel, 1834

While it once used to be a crucial topic, these days we have pretty much stopped thinking about the relationship between painting and photography, as if the two have stopped stepping on each other's toes a long time ago and now share little if no common ground.

But then you discover the work of Christen Købke, a Danish painter from the mid-19th century, and you really have to wonder if he may have played a key role in shaping what we call the great American color photography. I tried to google 'Købke + Sternfeld' to investigate, but I did not come up with much.

Joel Sternfeld, Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona, 1983

FOTOGRAFIA Festival 2011

2011-09-29T12:12:00.000+02:00

The tenth edition of the FOTOGRAFIA Festival in Rome is currently underway, and the offer this year is quite rich and interesting, as the screenshots below suggest.

From the widely reported Alec Soth's commissioned work about the city of Rome (see here or here) to an excellent group show about Italian photographers, to go on with 3/3 and their focus on Japan, or Rob Hornstra's New Dutch Storytellers, well there's plenty to see and I dare to say that more than any past edition this year the festival feels like a serious attempt to look into what is moving today, in Italy and abroad, in what we try to contain under the term contemporary photography. Rather than flattening the selection of artists over prefabricated formulas, this time the challenge is much more for the viewers to find their own way thrugh what it might at first look contradictory, but in the end it's just rich and promising diversity.

Stage photography

2011-09-27T10:47:00.001+02:00

Annelies de Mey photographs scenes that look like theatre stages from obscure plays we are about to watch, gorgeous palladium prints showing mysterious places where the distinction between outdoors or indoors lose any relevance, and everything looks as if it has been just revealed to us by the opening of a heavy velvet curtain.

Her most recent work is Codex2010 (for more info go the 'Editions' section in the website of the Galerie Jan Dhaese), a book about the Brussels Palace of Justice where she takes the viewer through a fascinating journey across the solemn halls, the marble stairs and the hidden corners of the Brussels courthouse - such a vast labyirinth that Wikipedia describes the palace as bigger than St Peter's Basilica at the Vatican.

(Read an interesting interview with the artist here)

All images © Annelies de Mey

"A state of silence"

2011-09-21T18:34:00.000+02:00

History sometimes can be perceived as too big to be confined within the space of a photograph, as Lithuanian artist Indre Serpytyte shows with her work on the memories fron the Cold War in her native region.

When no image can convey the scale of what happened, then maybe the best choice is to focus on small details: a military hat, some small models of houses or images of dark shelters under tall trees become the only way to remember the loss of somebody we loved, the cruelties perpetrated by the authorities and the resistance carried on by many.

All images © Indre Serpytyte

Portfolio Appreciation

2011-09-19T19:45:00.001+02:00

Stefano Parrini, Land Market

I really enjoy doing portfolio reviews, there is something special in the constant challenge of finding something interesting to say about a series of images (and in front of the person who made them, and who often payed some money to listen to yours and other peoples' opinion), no matter how unfinished sometimes they might look, or maybe simply wrong. I think it is something you owe the person sitting with you there - often on opposite sides of a table - to say things that can actually help them improve their work: no matter how much you feel that particular portfolio or not, you have to find a way to connect with it and imagine what could be its best potential.

This year I had another chance to do portfolio reviews at Savignano Immagini Festival, and I wanted to share with you a few really interesting works circulating from table to table:

Stefano Parrini, Land Market

- Land Market is a series of elaborate scenes set in natural spaces by Stefano Parrini, turning beautiful landscapes into a sort of Land Art aimed at criticising our consumerist culture, even though everything blends so perfectly in some images that it rather feels like we are simply watching scenes from another planet, where maybe trolleys wander around freely and balloons can grow on trees.

Michela Pandolfi, Who. Where.

- Michela Pandolfi has shown me the beginning of a really interesting and complicated project, Who. Where. , in which she restages scenes of photographs by famous artists using actors, but placing them digitally inside the background of the original photograph grabbed from the internet. She patiently merges the actors shot separately in a studio with the file of the original photo using Photoshop, I would imagine at the cost of hours and hours of painful work. The she jumps on a plane to reach an exhibition of the artist somewhere and photographs her images in front of the original art. So far the 'victim' has been Erwin Olaf, and the effect is halfway between a serious metalinguistic effort and a genuine laugh at the glossy investigation of human nature in Olaf's work, where top models in angst are supposed to enlighten us about the dark side of our soul. Seeing normal people with normal faces taking their place in those fancy compositions is definitely a way to make some justice and bring those images down to earth.

Michela Pandolfi, Who. Where.

Giorgio Di Noto, City n. 0

- Giorgio Di Noto is not really a discovery, as I happen to know very well the young man and we have been working together in the past, but seeing the jury giving him an award for his work City n. 0 on the peripheral suburbs of Rome was another confirmation of how well his photography is getting together - I really wish I could have made those photographs when I was 21-year-old myself, back in the day...

Giorgio Di Noto, City n. 0

Mobile report #3 - SiFest 2011

2011-09-17T15:32:00.006+02:00

For the third year in a row, I come back from the Savignano Immagini Festival (aka SiFest) with my eyes (and my ears) full of photography, of thoughts about photography, of faces from the world of photography. The 20th edition has been up to the task of celebrating such an important anniversary, and I will share some impressions with you through some posts on this blog. First a little photographic report from some of the exhibitions, then over the next few days we'll move to some really interesting photographers I discovered during last weekend, as well some new and some familiar names who received awards from the festival.

Guido Guidi, Carlo Scarpa's Tomba Brion

Massimo Mastrorillo, Temporary? Landscapes

Simon Roberts, Una Storia Italiana

Sin_tesis lab #03, Unstable landscapes, a workshop with Simon Roberts

Bas Princen, Refuse: Five Cities

Henk Wildschut, Shelter

Frank Breuer, Poles

Roderick Henderson, Transvoid

Marco Zanta, Tripoli talks, unfinished work

Michael Wolf, Tokyo Compression

Miroslav Tichy, Retrospettiva

Rob Hornstra/Arnold Van Bruggen, Empty Land, Promised Land, Forbidden Land

SiFest 2011

2011-09-07T11:37:00.000+02:00

Savignano Immagini Festival is back for its 20th edition from September 9 to September 11. A few highlights from what is in store this year, offering an excellent group of exhibitions by contemporary photographers:

- Carlo Scarpa’s Tomba Brion, by Guido Guidi
- Tokyo Compression, by Michael Wolf
- Empty land, promised land, forbidden land, by Rob Hornstra / Arnold Van Bruggen,
- Roads and Paths, by Bernhard Fuchs
- Global Photography, with works by Marco Zanta, Bas Princen, Henk Wildschut, Alexander Gronsky and more
- Una Storia italiana, by Simon Roberts

Full exhibition schedule here.

Lectures, portfolio reviews, wokshops, projections and much more are scheduled throughout the three days, as usual. I will be around for the whole weekend, looking forward to meet those of you who will be there!

Mobile report #2 - Occhi Rossi

2011-07-18T13:20:00.000+02:00

In a summer that's unfolding as busy as the worst cloudy October, I have been leaving on hold my posting plans for this poor neglected blog of mine, one of which was to share another exhibition report after the one you can find right below. This time it is not about single bodies of work, nor about any slick and stylish gallery space, but rather about the great feeling that can come when the enthousiasm of a large number of people meet a space so special that it merges with the photographs and the installations to become one big, whole fascinating thing.

Occhi Rossi is a festival devoted to promote "an independent photographic culture", an exhibition galore driven by the motto "show yourself", where countless photographers bring their work and set up freely their own photoshows, all in the name of going beyond the usual channels of distribution, diffusion and promotion. The result is an amazing sea of photographs on show through the tunnels of Forte Prenestino, a XIX fortress in Rome which has been one of the powerhouses of the squat culture and self-funding arts of the city for the last twenty years.

Being so used to a photographic culture ruled either by the cult of the author or the dictatorship of the subject matter, walking around those thousands of images was refreshing in many ways, bringing back photography to the joy of making something happen, something fun and serious at the same time. For once the whole thing was not about career, status or success, but it was just about the love of many people for what they do. The festival just closed its third edition, and over the years I could also see that the quality of the works on display has somehow improved, as if it was really a collective subject growing more mature edition after edition.

There might not have been any next big thing hiding among the avalanche of more or less amateur or solid photographs at Occhi Rossi this year, or perhaps I could not spot it, lost in the beautiful overload of the festival's line-up. But it's the same concept of the project that does not aim at highlighting single talents, because here the sum will always be greater the parts - there's no room for prima donnas at Occhi Rossi.

Mobile report #1 - 'Milano, un minuto prima'

2011-07-08T18:45:00.003+02:00

Milano, un minuto prima. Nuove visioni di una città is an exhibition currently at Forma in Milan, co-curated by Matteo Balduzzi, Arianna Rinaldo, Giulia Tornari and Francesco Zanot. Each of the curators chose a few artists gathered under the common theme of the city of Milan, elaborated in many different ways and expressing various photographic styles, going from documentary to reportage, from a conceptual approach to a personal diary. I visited the exhibition last week and grabbed some mobile phone shots of the installation, hope you'll enjoy the small virtual tour.

Fabrizio Bellomo, Le più belle vedute di milano e non vedo niente di diverso (btw, his website rocks)

Alessandro Imbriaco, Via Dante n. 2

Nicolò Degiorgis, Islam Nascosto

Maurizio Cogliandro, Credimi

Mirko Smerdel, I Vostri Grattacieli/2010

Nothing To See Here, magazine curated by Francesco Jodice for Naba

Massimiliano Foscati - Bernd Kleinheisterkamp, Outside My Door

Suddenly a corner of the gallery struck my attention: pieces of paper with some text were lined up on the wall together with small prints, all neatly nailed onto it, with no frames. The typewriting of the text somehow matched the quiet tone of the square photographs, showing interior and urban scenes, both colour and black and white, sharp and beautifully composed images, with that unspecified quality that in Italy we are used to call 'northern European'. And yet the images were deeply emotional, whether they were showing people walking on a street, a dog cuddling in the middle of a room, a man ironing his clothes, they had something really strong flowing through them.

Then I realised it was the text, those words were holding me in that corner of the gallery, forcing me to slow down the pace and telling me when and how to move from one image to the other. I remember little of what they said, other than it was the story of a man's crisis, private sufferings recalled in a handful of blue sheets of papers, written by Massimiliano Foscati and photographed by Bernd Kleinheisterkamp. Words and photographs rarely get such nourishment from each other, and I was so moved by the text that I had to photograph it, so I could have read it again, and I could have looked at it again, almost as if it was another photograph in the show. I'm posting one excerpt right below here - I hope the author won't mind.

Staged reporting

2011-06-24T11:26:00.009+02:00

Many of you probably already know Dide, the online magazine curated by Mohammadreza Mirzaei and devoted to contemporary Iranian photography. Over the months I have been collaborating on more than one occasion with Dide, writing texts for some of the 15 issues released since its birth. My most recent contribution is in the latest issue, featuring the work of Reza Aramesh, an Iranian-born artist living in London whose work is mostly made of restagings of iconic news photograph inside stately homes and museums around the UK.
Needless to say his work rang quite a few bells inside me, due to all the issues it raises about the language of news photography, and so I thank Mohammadreza for asking me to write some thoughts about those images.

Content awareness

2011-06-23T11:05:00.013+02:00

"These images express my surprise in discovering that Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother was the result of other, prior images. I should have known better perhaps, but icons, like sensible magicians, are better served when not revealing their secrets."

These few lines, taken from the statement for his series Content Aware Fill, already set the tone for the many projects by Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, an artist who would be legitimate to describe as part of the group of the 'photographic pihilosophers'. His images never stop raising the issue of how our own imagery is shaped, how we can find ourselves not having really chosen the way we look at things, and ultimately how photography can be a form of reappropriation of our gaze, to reset our visions and start again from scratch to look around us.

Here is what he writes about his image Digital Color Checker: "This single image is a re-photographic project prompted by Stephen Shore's 'Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975'."

Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975

"I visited the intersection in Los Angeles in January 2011 and used a digital color checker to interrupt and signify my re-presentation of the site as a digitally marked space.

My own investigations into the photograph and with the site come from an interest in the material and methodological relationships between the continuous richness of the analogue color that Shore was able to achieve and the limited and compartmentalized color that the form of the digital color checker seems to suggest."

All right, you have my attention now.

(found via Landscape Stories)

Images 1, 3 and 4 © Sherwin Rivera Tibayan

Making a Book - Danielle Mericle

2011-06-21T11:35:00.000+02:00

First it was the glimpse of an albino deer hiding behind the bushes, a small flash of white in the distance which left me going back many times to those images, wondering if I was daydreaming or the creature really appeared in front of the camera (and my eyes). Then it was the photograph of caring hands delicately touching the worn-out pages of an old book, the text almost erased by the action of time, the volume almost collapsing under its own weight.

Danielle Mericle is an artist who tries to represent how elusive is the act of framing what is in front of us, using photography to show things that are almost impossible to grasp. The evidence of what light records in a photograph becomes the mirror of our fantasies and of what we remember - or rather what we want or don't want to remember.

I asked Danielle to share some of her thoughts about bookmaking, both about her own work and about her publishing venture A-Jump Books, which releases her own artist's books and those of some other really interesting artists.

Enjoy the read!

Spread from Archive, by Danielle Mericle, A-Jump Books, 2010

Making a Book - Text by Danielle Mericle

I grew up in a town with limited access to museums and galleries, remotely located in the desert of the southwestern United States. There was no Internet then, and local interest in the arts had yet to be revived. Hence from an early age my experience of art was most often from perusing books in the bookstore. As an art student in college I was in a similar predicament, and soon came to have a deep appreciation for the accessibility, portability, and longevity of the book format. As a lover of books, I toyed with various book projects in my own work, but was stunted by the craftiness of what was then considered “book-making”- sewing, binding, etc without as much emphasis on content. So I went about making photographs for exhibitions, and put aside my aspirations to make books until I “hit it big” and had my very own high-end monograph.

Books continued to interest me greatly however, especially artist’s books- those works that were conceived of and took their form in the book format. In 2005 my partner Ron Jude had a book project in mind (Alpine Star) that he shopped around to various publishers- basically he was told that this was an “artist’s book” and to simply self-publish. After investigating press options and learning more about the capabilities of InDesign, we realized that we should in fact simply publish the book ourselves. And so A-Jump Books was born. Our intention was to produce books that fell within the “artist book” mold, but of higher quality than much of what was available at the time (this has changed significantly in the past five years).

A-Jump Books titles

In 2006 I started a project that would later become Seneca Ghosts. At the time I was working heavily in both photography and video- playing still images off of fixed frame video pieces of varying duration in a gallery setting. When I started shooting for Seneca Ghosts, I envisioned it operating in a similar way. Midway through the project, I began wondering if this project might not be better suited to the book form. The work demanded a temporal aspect that was difficult to achieve in an exhibition—repeating motifs, moments of pause and repose - all to convey a sense of the fallacy of memory. I began playing with sequencing- struggling to find the right amount of information to share while not giving away the whole story. (I firmly believe that most successful photography retains an inherent mystery.)

Seneca Ghost, by Danielle Mericle, 2008

After months of shooting and resequencing, I settled on the final version and set to work getting it printed and designed. I wanted something modest in size and scale on uncoated paper, to allow for an intimacy of experience that was compelling yet also strangely distant. In short, the book design should mimic the conceptual underpinning of the work itself- speaking to our limited ability to access and understand the world through memory, direct experience, and, by extension, photography. What resulted was aligned with my original intentions, and on a practical level cost me no more than a full-scale exhibition of the work would have.
Front cover of Seneca Ghost, by Danielle Mericle, A-Jump Books, 2008
Front cover of Archive, by Danielle Mericle, A-Jump Books, 2010

My most recent book, Archive, came about in a more organic fashion. I was traveling in Peru for my job at Cornell University Library, and didn’t realize until midway through the trip that the images I was capturing on my point-and-shoot resonated for me on a deeper level. The content was very consistent with many of my artistic interests- looking at the complex intersections of history, power and knowledge. At that point I began shooting more voraciously, and with clear intent. With Seneca Ghosts under my belt I had no question that this would be a book project. The sequencing was extremely important on Archive - I was taking very disparate subjects and interweaving them so as to create new associations and meanings- yet it had to retain a modicum of legibility less I lose my audience. Ultimately I ended up going through two major revisions-each about a year apart from one another (I took a significant break from the project and came back to it after the birth of my son). I also had a very clear sense of the design of the book- I knew I wanted it to mimic a more literary format, and that it should be hardcover to echo the books I photographed in the archive. Ultimately we modeled the design on a W.G. Sebald book I found on my shelf, and, working with Oddi Press in Iceland, determined the appropriate paper stock and book cloth color.

Spreads from Archive, by Danielle Mericle, A-Jump Books, 2010

I am now working on a new book project, this time for a different publisher. This will be my first experience working with someone other than A-Jump, and I’m excited to operate in a collaborative fashion with people I’m less familiar with. Meanwhile A-Jump Books is starting to expand outwards and is working with more artists. Last year we completed a piece with Dan Torop, a New York based photographer whose work we really love; and this year we will be producing two new books, one with Portland based photographer Shawn Records and another with Ithaca based photographer/writer Nick Muellner (with whom we’ve worked before).

Spread and front cover from Skydiving, by Dan Torop, A-Jump Books, 2010

Books continue to excite me as much as they ever have, and I’m finding that my thinking now is geared toward the book form, with exhibitions feeling tangential to the process.

All images © Danielle Mericle/A-Jump Books

Suburbia

2011-06-14T09:39:00.009+02:00

Italian photographer Ettore Moni just self-published his book Suburbia, a series of black and white urban landscapes, taken in the European cities of Genoa and Bilbao, which aim to raise some questions about the shape of those cities, the idea of space lying behind them, the role and freedom of space left for us human beings inside them.

Ettore was kind enough to ask me to contribute to the book with a text, of which I am happy to post some excerpts here as well (Italian only, sorry).

- L’immagine di una città

C’è stato un tempo in cui la periferia di una città voleva dire comunità suburbane, dinamiche e legami sociali, un panorama che conservava comunque una dimensione antropologica percepibile: oggi siamo invece abituati a immaginare l’espansione di una metropoli come un fenomeno eminentemente fisico, fatto di progettazione urbana, ottimizzazione dell’uso dello spazio, riempimento di vuoti. Architetture puramente funzionali riempiono quasi completamente il campo visivo, luoghi senza immagine che si impongono soltanto per l’uso che ne viene fatto, una presenza nuda e cruda che non prova minimamente a sciogliersi in una vaga armonia di linee, o in una coesistenza organica con ciò che sta intorno.

Ettore Moni ha voluto provare a tratteggiare la geografia di una Suburbia, questo luogo espanso che esiste in una sua forma specifica nelle varie città in cui prende forma, ma che sembra comunque portare con sé caratteristiche invariabili e indifferenti alle specificità dei diversi luoghi. Nelle sue immagini si percepisce uno straniante coesistere di vastità e costrizione, ampiezza e affollamento, un affastellarsi di forme che a volte si calpestano o si arrampicano l’una sopra l’altra, altre volte si fronteggiano come a sfidarsi per il controllo del territorio.

[...]

Si tratta di una sfida cruciale che i fotografi si trovano ad affrontare, riuscire a far parlare le proprie immagini in modo da proporre una possibile lettura di questi luoghi, piuttosto che limitarsi semplicemente a ribadirne la presenza attraverso delle fotografie. Ettore Moni questa sfida l’ha raccolta in modo al tempo stesso leggero e profondo, proponendoci delle fotografie dove la visione analitica dei frammenti di un territorio plasmato e a volte imprigionato coesiste con un sincero stupore per ciò che lo sguardo trova davanti a sé; una fusione di consapevolezza e autentico smarrimento che fa sì che le sue siano davvero domande in forma di immagini, interrogativi che si costruiscono una fotografia dopo l’altra, invitandoci a non smettere di chiederci in che modo le città cambiano e crescono, come se si stessero dimenticando di noi che viviamo al loro interno.

- Fabio Severo

All images © Ettore Moni

Inside a camera

2011-05-30T11:33:00.011+02:00

It appears that Abelardo Morell does not have the right to the exclusive use of camerae obscurae in photography anymore, as after the recent discovery of Asier Gogortza's military bunkers (also here), I just found out that Peruvian artist Pablo Hare made some beautiful photographs of the landscape of Lima, projected on the walls of empty rooms.

"Everything has been done before, the trick is in doing it better."

I like the idea of artists sharing a technique that leads to such dangerously similar results, also considering the recurrent thoughts about plagiarism in photography. Should somebody give up because there has been already another one who darkened a room and let the light come in through a tiny hole to project the outside world on the walls inside? Should deadpan portraiture be limited to a small number of photograhers? And what about tall buildings in fast-rising Asian cities?

The camera obscura fascinates me because it always brings us back to the magic of the creation of an image, it is the closest thing to watching the latent image appear on a sheet of paper bathing in a darkroom tray. Rather than deciding if more than one person is entitled to make art with it, I would go the opposite way, recreating the whole history of photography through it, projecting all kinds of images on those walls: places, people, abstractions. Since digital photography (I know, I repeat myself) made us lose a bit of the feeling of the physical presence of an image, then showing the inside of a camera could be a good antidote - the closest thing to actually watching photography happen.

All images © Pablo Hare

"It started with a ride to the fields, a long ride."

2011-05-25T11:14:00.003+02:00

"Sometimes I wondered how we looked from a distance; a group of haggard looking men in worn boots, haphazardly marching from one side of the field to the other. Unclear for who or where to, never asking why, always trying to do as we were told."

"Whenever I pass by these fields again, I am always briefly surprised that there are no groups of men, marching. That nobody sits where the field meets the road, happily drinking their beer. That the only thing left is the field itself, the sun, some traces of us here and there. An empty pack of cigarettes. A button. A shell casing. A memory."

Some stories are hard to be discovered, hidden in places, reluctant to be told. Then, when you find them, you can hardly stop chasing them, running after the countless traces they leave on the ground.

Michael de Kooter lost himself in the Yucca Valley, a journey between truth and fiction that has just started, a chain of deceiving memories where men wander through a land they don't recognize anymore, fighting an invisible enemy who is far more dangerous than the outlaws they used to meet along their way.

The journey will continue, and what is only a short preview hidden behind some scratch-off silver ink will grow, unfold and reveal the story of people and places now covered by the dust of time.

"...the only thing left is the field itself, the sun, some traces of us here and there".

An old collapsed building, an abandoned church, a dry and empty land. Are they from the same place? What did they use to be like, what are they now?

There is plenty to find inside the Yucca Valley, stay tuned for more over the following months.

Lazlo Magazine #0

2011-05-25T10:16:00.007+02:00

Out now, and it really looks great:

"Lazlo Magazine is a place of investigation through expression, a platform for debate and creativity; bold ideas in fresh forms. A half-yearly independent magazine drawing inspiration and content from (and aiming to reach) the academic chair and the club dance floor, the artist’s atelier and the scientist`s laboratory, the catwalk and the sidewalk. We interview, overview and review. Take pictures, draw illustrations and play music. We write narrative and poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Deconstruct and demystify. Reconstruct and link."

Lazlo Magazine
Issue #0 - Spring 2010
19,9 x 26,7 cm
148 pages
English
Edit by Lazlo Moulton
Photo Editors and Distribution 3/3

Tondo

2011-05-23T09:39:00.013+02:00

Susanne Brügger, Augentrost. Vororte im Visier #1, 2006-2008

Susanne Brügger's art probably represents the very first time that I found the use of tondo applied to photography, and thus creating a fascinating set of contrasts. Her suburban images have that feeling of stolen glances and subtle awkwardness that remind of Michael Wolf's Google View series, and although they are much more composed and rich in details than those screen grabs, you still wonder at times if those images do have an author or are just another product of some technological invisible eye. Then there's the round edge of the images, enclosing all the straight lines of the street views and bringing us back to the miniature paintings or the art from the XVI century.

Susanne Brügger, Augentrost. Vororte im Visier #13, 2006-2008

Susanne Brügger, Augentrost. Vororte im Visier #10, 2006-2008

Lack of informations in languages other than German leaves me guessing about the initial idea behind the project and the meaning of Augentrost. Vororte im Visier, which seems to be the title.

Sandro Botticelli, Madonna del Melograno, c. 1487

The tondos were soft borders sealing with their shape the importance of what they were showing, Brügger's suburban circles on the contrary seem to enhance the feeling of shapelessness of our cities, a sea of edges and corners where curved lines seem to have no place to be.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Tondo Doni, 1506-1507

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Le Bain turc, c. 1862

(thanks again to Joscha)

Graduation

2011-05-20T15:54:00.009+02:00

Students year-end projects at art schools or universities can be really interesting objects, full of enthusiasm, diverse, even careless. They come at the stage of someone's career where coherence can be less important than variety, when often there is less concern for tradition than lust for exploring all the different options, dismantling conventions and not worrying too much about the viewer's needs to be entertained.

Joscha Bruckert's portfolio Nicht Eins ('Not One') from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmund, Germany is the perfect example of all this, with its elusive subject matter, strong images and mixed media - as his artist statement can also confirm:

"The author wishes to remark that an accompanying text to his work would imply that the knowledge of its intention would be of use for a potential viewer and that there would be a specific meaning, which could only be revealed through external information. On the contrary, it shall be understood that the author, at the time of completing his work, turned into the viewer himself and that the accrued objects are no more than what they are. They attain distinction due to the mere fact that one sees them. In addition to this it is to be mentioned that there is only one topic, not only in this, but in every case: a principle which pervades the tangible and intangible world, eluding representation and remaining the essential element within all creative work. The author therefore would like to point out that these remarks are not text accompanying his work."

I would be more than happy to receive and feature more submissions about students' projects from all kinds of photography insitutions, should you be interested you can contact me at the usual e-mail address info@hippolytebayard.com.

All images © Joscha Bruckert

More shelters

2011-05-11T10:40:00.008+02:00

Thanks to J. Wesley Brown I discovered one more 'shelter photographer', Andrew Bush. It is interesting how different authors can go towards the same thing and with a similar attitude, same kind of spirit. Discreetness, simplicity, cooperation/interaction with who you photograph, all things that I like in photography.

Maybe shelters strike a chord in photographers, something about the fact that they call for the need of something else, something that can be used to evoke a bigger story, a struggle for life, a struggle for safety, or who knows what else. Symbols and metaphors are always a curse and a blessing for photography, and can be easily abused. What I like about all these shelter works is that their style is peaceful enough to let me imagine my own story, without any imposed morale pretending to guide me.
But Andrew Bush is not only about that, his work is made of many different series where he acts like a collector of pieces of daily life, little typologies of the all the everyday things we always look at, but rarely see.

Jacques Derrida's room of his published books in his home in Ris Orange, France, 2001

All images © Andrew Bush

Street photographer

2011-05-10T10:32:00.011+02:00

I never heard of Anthony Hernandez before seeeing the Anonymes exhibition at Le Bal last November, and I was struck by his extraordinary black and white views of Los Angeles in the 70's (read a text by Doug Rickard and also an interesting review of the work by Jeff Ladd), images so rich that it feels like they condense many photographs and many photographic genres in themselves. In each of those photos I thoguht that I could see some of the best that urban landscape, street and portrait photography could offer at the same time, as if I could create my own personal photographs by moving my eyes across the space of Hernandez plates, framing and reframing their surface inside my mind.

Later I discovered more of his work, and while he also made some more traditional b&w street photography in the style of Garry Winogrand and many others, what I found excellent was his series of passers-by in Beverly Hills, where a sense of immediacy and of fakery collide in the soft colours of life in the Platinum Triangle.

Through the years is work took further new directions, like the colour series Landscape for the Homeless, which adds a new chapter to our photographic journey through nomadic life, shelters and temporary houses.

All images © Anthony Hernandez

Making a Book - Judith van IJken

2011-05-06T10:58:00.026+02:00

The new installment of the 'Making a Book' series features a text by Dutch artist Judith van IJken, who kindly agreed to share her thoughts about books and photography starting from the innovative concept of her latest project Mimicry. In her text she also recalls a few early projects she made in China, where several themes like storytelling, the sequencing of the photographs or the process of shaping the physical object of a book started to arise and prepared the road for what she created in the following years.

Enjoy the read.

- Making a book, by Judith van IJken

When looking at photo books I think it’s interesting to divide them into two categories. The first category consists of the books that I consider work more or less like a museum. The most important purpose of the book and the design are to underline and show the photographs in the best way possible. The second category consists of the photo books that can be considered to be a work in itself. In these books the design and the characteristics of a book plays an important role in the book as a whole. The three elements; photographs, design and characteristics of the book as a medium need to work closely together.

Mimicry is the title of the book that I made last year. The book consists of portraits of people aged approximately thirty years old wearing a piece of clothing that one of their parents used to wear when they had the same age, together with a old photograph of their parents wearing the specific item. When working on the project I had difficulty figuring out how to present these photographs together. When the old and the new photograph would be presented on a spread next to each other I felt the emphasis would lie to much upon the new photograph being a reaction on the old photograph. My aim was for the photographs to have more of a relation together. I wanted them to work together to emphasize the relationship between the two generations. Then somebody told me to talk to graphic designer SYB.

SYB is a very good graphic designer who’s designs very much use the characteristics of the book as a medium. This collaboration led to the specific design of Mimicry. The book now has short pages and fold-over pages. When opening a spread at first the short page or the fold-over page partly covers the other photograph and visually a relationship appears between the two photos. This was exactly what I was looking for.

I asked the philosopher Bas Haring if he wanted to write a text about the subject of Mimicry. It was important for me that the text wouldn’t be about the book but that it would be a text about the subject. When looking at the book now I am very happy to see how these three elements, the photographs, the design and the text all seem to have their own position and that they all seem to work together.

In den vreemde

A couple of years ago I made two little books. They are called In den vreemde and Verloren Ruimte. I made these two books when I lived in China for a period of time. I lived in a gated community in Xiamen and the gated community was a new phenomenon for me to experience. I was surprised to notice how predictable days inside a gated community were. In this same period I found a couple of very old little Chinese photo books in a little shop. These books would show a whole movie but in still photographs. I decided to take these little books as a starting point for a ‘moviebook’ of my own gated community. It would be a walk through the area and the photographs in the little book would take the viewer along. For me it was more about the way the photographs would follow each other than about the single photographs and how the predictability would come across.

Writing this text about Mimicry and photobooks I realize that when making In den vreemde I was in a way also thinking about a way how the characteristics of the book (the following pages) and the photographs could work together.

'There was a fly in my camera. It must have crawled in when I changed the film. I opened the camera to get it out. When I looked through the viewfinder it was still there. Clever place, I remember thinking. I didn't see him again. Not even in the photographs.'

- Judith van IJken

All images © Judith van IJken

A sight to behold

2011-04-28T17:38:00.011+02:00

Onkel Rudi winkt | Marathontreppe, Berlin, 2005

Using pinholes or spectacle lenses, Oliver Möst has chosen blurrines as one of the key elements of his photographic works. The out-of-focus represents for him the way to rethink certain trends in contemporary photography, where imperfections and DIY mood turned into some kind of consolidated style, crossing both fine art and commercial photography.

Orange, Ærø, 2008

Through the use of old fashioned technical procedures, Möst attempts to reset the meaning of these effects and take them beyond the simple status of visual tricks. His series include still lives, tipologies, portraiture, abstract, creating an interesting revisitation of some of the major trends of contemporary photography through the foggy surface of his images.

Kantstraße / Joachimsthaler Straße, Unter den Linden, Berlin, 2000

Audigraphien, for example, is a series of pinhole landscapes taken from the window of his Audi 80 while driving around: "The advantage of photography is that a brief moment of our reality can be clearly and precisely captured with the press of a button. “Snap” and a picture of a particular place at a particular time is created. But is a snapshot really a representation of our reality? Are we not constantly on the move? And do we not perceive our surroundings in a vague and haphazard, rather than a clear and precise, way?" Cannot but agree with his words.

Nachtbus, Budapest, 2004

All images © Oliver Möst

Shelters

2011-04-27T17:28:00.009+02:00

In days when immigration is more than ever a big issue around Mediterranean Europe, it is worth mentioning Henk Wildschut and his excellent photographic work about illegal immigrants who managed to enter the EU (find a review of his book Shelter on Conscientious).

A friend once told me how we always tend to think that people escaping their countries and facing such long and exhausting journeys must be desperate, running away from some living hell compared to which anything else would be better, any 24-hour trip through a dark sea packed on a small boat would be preferable. And he made me realise that this way we ignore what is probably the main thing about the choice of those migrants: their courage, their dignity and their strength to refuse their present condition, doing anything possible to start a new life, pretending more from their existence to the point of risking all to get the chance to be in a different place, and to live in a different way.

The people and the shelters shown in Wildschut's photographs maintain their courage and their dignity somehow, that strength that you need to preserve some kind of everyday life for yourself no matter where you are: a bed, a roof, a mirror to check your face, a fire for a meal. The fine line between feeling lost and holding on to what you really want, the strength to imagine what you still don't have, believing you will get it one day.

Other artists I have mentioned in the past had makeshift shelters at the centre of their works, so this is a good chance to take another look to Inabitanti by Tancredi Mangano and to A Place to Stay by Alessandro Imbriaco.

All images © Henk Wildschut

"Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire..."

2011-04-24T22:07:00.008+02:00

Chris Bucklow is one of those artists who in the past could have easily been described by certain critics as "an artist who uses photography" rather than a photographer, caught in the middle of the battle to grasp the meaning of a supposed pure photography that filled so many pages and gave so many headaches.

His work Guests is an ongoing series of pinhole human silhouettes made with thousands of tiny holes on sheets of aluminium foil, through which light exposes photographic paper.

From the press release of his exhibition in 2010 at Danziger Projects: "Bucklow begins by projecting the shadow of his sitter on a large sheet of aluminum foil and tracing its outline. He then makes thousands of small pinholes in the foil silhouette, one for each day of the subject's approximate lifespan. Using a contraption of his own device that places the foil over a large sheet of photographic paper, Bucklow wheels his homemade "camera" out into daylight and pulls the "shutter" to briefly expose the paper to direct sunlight. Thus each finished picture becomes a kind of photogram silhouette composed of thousands of pinhole photographs of the sun. The intensity of light on a given day and the length of exposure create unique color variations on how the resulting piece appears."

Human figures made of an amount of light corresponding to the length of their lifespan: perhaps the only way one single photograph could rightfully claim to capture the essence of somebody...

All images taken from the series Guests © Chris Bucklow

Defending Journalists Worldwide

2011-04-24T21:42:00.006+02:00

Tim Hetherington, from the series Sleeping Soldiers

The recent deaths of photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in Libya had a widespread coverage that should be a reminder for what happens to many other journalists every year in several parts of the world. CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists) monitors the situation of the freedom of press worldwide and reports about missing, imprisoned or killed journalists.

Here is the list of journalists killed in 2011 so far.

Planting a seed

2011-04-19T22:37:00.008+02:00

More pinhole musings with Jan Dunning, a British artist devoted to the stenopeic vision whose images show unlikely life forms, like giant plants growing from the floor of a room, "remote and unnerving landscapes" or "hybrid creatures involved in a process of change or evolution". Dunning carefully constructs or stages her photographs, inducing a fascinating suspension of disbelief.

The beauty of her work is exactly in the reversal of truth and fiction that she creates with her technique: while the mysterious blend of sharpness and blur of pinhole is often used to make ordinary things look extraordinary and magic, Dunning uses it to make the impossible look real. A veil of uncertainty fogs the light of her photographs, so that we can for once stop wondering if something is real or fake, and appreciate the simple fact that it feels real. With images like these, it is a nice feeling indeed.

All images © Jann Dunning

Bird's-eye view

2011-04-18T23:35:00.011+02:00

Coming from a weekend of lenseless photography at Pinhole Days 2011 in Rome, during which I held a lecture about the many faces of pinhole in contemporary photography, I felt that I wanted to share with all of you some of the beautiful discoveries I made while researching material for my slideshow.

I'll start with the work that actually ended my presentation, A heartwarming feeling by the Singaporean photographer Zhao Renhui. There can't be better words to introduce it than the ones Renhui himself wrote:

"Climate change has significant impact on birds. It can alter distribution, abundance and behavior. It can also affect events like bird migration. [...]

A recent phenomenon in the Arctic Circle is the emergence of mass bird graves. It seems as if different species of migrating birds due for the south has been flying the opposite direction, in an apparent act of suicide. Very little research has been done on this phenomenon. [...] "

"On January 2008, I collaborated with the Yamshina Institute for Ornithology (a regional expert in bird banding) in an attempt to document this phenomenon during an artist residency. A group of a few thousand migratory birds were banded by the Institute over the course of two months. Besides banding the birds with a metal band on their legs, I included a small pin-hole camera near each band. Inside each camera was a very small sheet of positive photographic paper of extremely low sensitivity. [...]

On June 2010, 50 of the birds were dead found in the Arctic Circle. 30 of the birds still had their cameras intact and 12 of the cameras actually created an image of the bird's rather confused migratory journey to the Arctic."

"What I found intriguing when I enlarged the images was that much of the bird's journey might have been captured (recorded while it was flying, never long enough to register a still) in all the blurry colourful hues we see in the images. Parts of the mountainous Arctic landscape, however, registered quite clearly. The only way that these landscapes could have formed on the paper was when the bird came to a final rest and laid on the ice, because that would give the pin-hole camera enough time to form a clear and still image - which is probably the last view of the bird before it died."

- Zhao Renhui, October 2010, Yamanshina.

All images © Zhao Renhui

Pinhole Days

2011-04-11T11:05:00.013+02:00

"Un bunker è una costruzione militare concepita per osservare, mirare, sparare. Dalla sua piccola apertura si riesce a ritagliare una porzione specifica di paesaggio, restringendo il nostro angolo visivo a una sorta di poligono di tiro. Dietro alla distribuzione di questi insediamenti e alla ragnatela che disegnano lungo il territorio c'è il desiderio implicito di prendere possesso del paesaggio. Muovendo queste riflessioni su un piano puramente fotografico, questo progetto vuole riutilizzare i bunker con uno scopo artistico; impossessarsi del loro siginificato bellico e trasformarli in degli osservatori sul paesaggio da cui 'si fa fuoco' sul bersaglio. Il fotografo ha quindi utilizzato il foro stenopeico per trasformare i bunker in apparecchi fotografici di cemento, per fotografare i paesaggi che erano e sono tuttora i bersagli di questi bunker."

Asier Gogortza così descrive il suo progetto Concrete Landscapes, morbide forme naturali che invadono la durezza del cemento nelle scure caverne delle nostre guerre passate, come fossero l'equivalente fotografico del mettere un fiore dentro la canna di un fucile, e al tempo stesso l'apertura verso un'infinità di riflessioni sul senso storico del paesaggio e sul nostro modo di osservarlo.

Concrete Landscapes debutterà in Italia con una mostra all'interno di Pinhole Days, un festival curato da ars-imago dedicato alla fotografia stenopeica alla vigilia del World Wide Pinhole Day 2011. Mostre, workshop e incontri si svolgeranno a Roma dal 15 al 23 aprile prossimi.

"The bunker is a war construction designed to look, watch and shoot. From the small windows one can capture a specific part of the landscape, honing the visual angle into a target range. Behind the special location of these settlements, which create a complex spider web spanning across the territory, there is an implicit desire to take over the landscape. Adapting these assumptions to photographic thinking, this project aims to reuse the bunkers with an artistic purpose; to steal their military connotations and transform them into landscape observatories from where the target is “fired upon”. The photographer has used the pinhole technique to convert bunkers into large concrete cameras and take pictures of the concrete landscape that were and are target of the bunkers."

Asier Gogortza is the artist behind the project Concrete Landscapes, soft natural forms invading the harshness of dark concrete caves from our past wars, perhaps the photographic equivalent of placing a flower inside a rifle barrel - and at the same time an excellent way to question the historical meaning of our landscape and our own way of looking at it.

Concrete Landscapes will have its Italian debut with an exhibition during Pinhole Days, a festival devoted to pinhole photography curated by ars-imago ahead of the 2011 World Wide Pinhole Day, with exhibitions, workshops and lectures in Rome on April 15 - 23.

All images © Asier Gogortza

In Praise of Light

2011-04-07T10:23:00.009+02:00

“I could see the road clearly just then and, plunked down on the mud beside it, big squares and cubes of houses, their walls whitened by the moonlight, like big unequal blocks of ice, pale and silent. Would be this the end of it all? How much time in this desolation after they’d done for me? Before it was all over? […] That night I had everything to myself. I was the owner of the moon, the village and an enormous fear.”

I have always dreamed to see - or more daringly, to make - an image that could show what these words by Louis-Ferdinand Céline describe, the whiteness of ice glowing in the deepest night. Many times I pictured in my mind a photograph that would force me to hold my eyes wide open in order to see, like we do when we walk in the dark and we try to guess what is a step ahead of us; or a photograph that would make me squint for its brightness, hiding its countless details inside a blinding light. Photography always needs light, of course, but how can photography really be about light, committed to it?

We have chosen ten artists who’ve devoted their work to the beauty of light, each of them crafting a different poem to it: chanting its absence and all the ghosts it evokes in the theatre of night, or its sheer force and the scars it leaves on the surface of a film; light as the endless shades of colours painting the true heart of a land, or the veil hiding all the unearthly creatures lurking in a forest. Whether it is fading or shining in every little corner, light is not meant to show, anyway: it is meant to conceal, to transform, to invent. It is a source of different worlds, of different creatures, it is a gate for our fantasy. Light is a way to free our eyes from the trivial duty of seeing, to give ourselves a chance, instead, to feel through them.

- Fabio Severo

'In Praise of Light' is the title of this text I wrote for Unless You Will #14, a double issue curated by me and Heidi Romano, featuring the work of:

Alia Malley
Awoiska van der Molen
Chrystel Lebas
Claus Stolz
Feng Bin
Virginia Woods-Jack
Gianpaolo Arena
Deborah Parkin
Simon Høgsberg
Peter Puklus

Leave notice

2011-03-07T16:08:00.002+01:00

I will be away for the whole week, posting will resume after March 15.

Stick around and see you soon!

Night drama

2011-03-03T11:21:00.011+01:00

Tommaso Fiscaletti often goes out at night, through dark streets and empty amusement parks, or spying the lit windows of rows of apartments. Sometimes he walks inside those houses, where the fiction of life takes place, with characters posing like statues, frozen while performing actions reminding of obscure rituals.

A feeling of loneliness and slight alienation pervades those domestic night scenes, and looking at them all together I get the funny feeling I am strolling inside one big mural by Gregory Crewdson: moving from one room to the other of eerie houses, then going outside, hiding behind a bush, then looking inside the car on that corner, just under the street lamp.

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, Summer 2006

(found via 3/3, curators of an exhibition of photographs by Fiscaletti opening at Maelstrom Art Gallery in Milan on March 10)

Circular cities

2011-02-28T18:51:00.009+01:00

Hiroshima, September - November 2003

"The narrative behind the Diorama Map series is the fluid nature of memory and the setting is always a city.
The creation of a Diorama Map takes the following method; Walking around the chosen city on foot; shooting from various location with film; pasting and arranging of the re-imagined city from my memory as layered icons of the city."

Kyoto, June - October 2003

For those who think photography of the urban landcsape is starting to look all the same, Sohei Nishino could be a pleasant discovery: rather than endlessly praising the New Topographics behind us, why not approach the subject and actually draw a city with photographs? More or less the way a child would draw a house with a chimney and a fence, trees around and a blue sky and some fluffy clouds on top, not caring about what should be bigger or smaller, what should be up or down, near or far.

Osaka, February - June 2003

All images taken from Diorama Map © Sohei Nishino

Point Sublime

2011-02-28T11:30:00.012+01:00

"Or to reach my dad, best build a fire out of wet birch, wave your jacket over the flames. He is more likely to answer a smoke signal than an email."

A few weeks ago we talked about Andrew Phelps' latest projects, Point Sublime, a little book and a printset Andrew made with photographs taken by his father at Point Sublime on the north rim of the Grand Canyon in 1984.

"The set is in an edition of 300, which isn't exactly low, but you aren't buying this for its rarity, but for a good cause! 100% of the proceeds go to the research of prostate cancer. In the summer of 2011 I will personally hand a check over to the research department and technicians who have treated my father for the last 2 years".

I just wanted to share with you the pleasure of receiving it, having found it in my mail last Saturday - you might want to have one too!

Tripoli

2011-02-21T23:00:00.017+01:00

From BBC News, February 22, 2011:

"Security forces and protesters have clashed in Libya's capital for a second night, after the government announced a new crackdown.

Witnesses say warplanes have fired on protesters in Tripoli.

To the west of the city, sources say the army is fighting forces loyal to ruler Col Muammar Gaddafi, who appears to be struggling to hold on to power.

Libya's deputy envoy to the UN has called on Col Gaddafi to step down, and accused his government of genocide.

Ibrahim Dabbashi said that if Col Gaddafi did not relinquish power, "the Libyan people will get rid of him"."

"...warplanes have fired on protesters..."

The situation in Libya is one of the most dramatic examples of scarcity of informations of all kinds and gravity of the events taking place. These days the country is shut down, and free reporting is almost impossible. But today's medias allow informations to leak somehow anyway, and we read all these fragments of life (and death) as they are happening, which make them sound a bit like bursts lost in silence.

In-between these bursts, you might feel like you want to see something actually coming from there, lay your eyes on pieces of that land, to have the feeling or at least the illusion you can picture what is happening right now. Marco Zanta traveled to Tripoli many times over the last months, and these days his images seem to me the perfect place to go to think about all we are hearing from that city, all those things so huge we can barely imagine them.

All images taken from La Città © Marco Zanta

Photographic noise

2011-02-19T10:53:00.014+01:00

We all know that these days looking at photography has become more and more an immaterial experience, and my fear is that if we lose the habit of watching physical images, what will we be really looking for in a picture in the end?

If you listen to music on a crappy stereo (with a tiny mp3), what you get is basically just the melody, because all the rest gets lost. But what if you listen to something that has no melody, for example?
Can we say that a computer monitor is the equivalent of a crappy stereo, ultimately?

And, most important, what is the melody in a photograph?

These Saturday morning thoughts brought to my mind the work of Maria Dabrowski, and I am not sure if it's for her photographs, for her book design (she's Dutch) or for her website as a whole: the intimate storytelling of her images is perfectly matched by the retro look of her online portfolios, where collages, old paper folders and a general feeling of found photos makes you feel like there's a vinyl crackling in the background while you're browsing through the pages.

All images © Maria Dabrowski

"Overwhelmingly homogenous"

2011-02-15T12:40:00.005+01:00

Dieuwertje Komen has just launched her brand new website, so I take this chance to introduce you to her excellent (mostly urban) landscape photography, where you'll have plenty of choice among the many series she presents. Whether it is personal or commissioned work, Komen's images raise many discreet and yet important questions about the spaces we live in.

Sometimes I wonder if the main outcome of the contemporary visual topography is having shown the differences between the various man-altered landscapes or instead reveal the dreadful uniformity that is shaping the majority of the urban settlements, and most of all, of the ideas behind them.

Dieuwertje Komen's work moves exactly along the line of this dilemma: "For the series Commonness I've portrayed the cities Bordeaux, Kosice, Mechelen, Plzen and Mons all European cities that aspire to the title of European Capital of Culture", she writes. "The resulting pictures display a similarity between the different cities, a discovery both surprising and unsettling since the cities compete for the title with distinctive assets. And yet, here they are shown to be overwhelmingly homogenous".

Homogeneity can be suffocating, but at least there is something graceful in Komen's vision, as she proved herself to be able to draw the greater picture of those urban dystopias, and yet somehow left space for imaginary escape routes, subversive plans, hope for something different.

All images taken from Commonness © Dieuwertje Komen

Engaged observation

2011-02-10T10:17:00.010+01:00

On his website, young Dutch photographer Tom Janssen presents himself as a documentary photographer, but I would say that his work is slightly different from what we usually call that way. His images are wide scenes of urban (and sometimes natural) spaces, where slowly we detect something happening inside.

Groups of people gathered to watch something, the core of their attention often concelead from us: Janssen's images show the theatre where a photographer would normally move, looking for the right shots and the right angles, moving inside the people, choosing the good background and the captivating details, but perhaps ignoring the complexity of the whole scene. Janssen focuses exactly on that, and if I had to choose an example of what an engaged observation could be in photography, I would definitely choose his photographs.

All images © Tom Janssen

Human surfaces

2011-02-07T11:07:00.008+01:00

Hiding in the City No. 93 - Supermarket No. 2, 2010

"Some people call me the invisible man, but for me it's what is not seen in a picture which is really what tells the story".

Teatro alla Scala, 2010

Meet Liu Bolin and his work Camouflage, which definitely makes him the Georges Rousse of the human body. Will Georges be happy of that? Hard to tell.

More info here.

Hiding in the City No. 71 - Bulldozer, 2008

All images © Liu Bolin

Black gold

2011-01-30T10:16:00.008+01:00

Phil Nesmith sent word about his latest project, Flow, "a new series of wet collodion black glass ambrotypes made on the Gulf coast in Louisiana during the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster".

As he showed already with his previous work My Baghdad - where he made ferrotypes from digital shots taken during his one year stint in Iraq - Nesmith has the ability to use alternative photographic processes to go deeper into contemporary issues, this time using the wet collodion process to better capture the spirit of the disaster caused by an endless flow of the black gold.

"It is fitting to use a photographic method from the time when our lust for oil was just beginning in order to capture the spirit of the disaster". [...]

"In 1859 Edwin L. Drake, working for the Seneca Oil Company in Pennsylvania, drilled the first modern oil well, ushering in the beginning of America's oil boom and our worldwide dependence on this resource. At the same time, the wet collodion photographic process that I used for this project was revolutionizing what photography could capture, ultimately changing the way people saw the world. The use of oil would expand until modern life could not exist as we know it without a continual supply".

Find two reviews of the Flow exhibition here and here, and you also might want to have a look at Nesmith's own blog, The Visual Adventure.

All images taken from Flow © Phil Nesmith

'Self-image' - A review of 'Queen Ann. P.S. Belly cut off', by Mariken Wessels

2011-01-25T21:53:00.015+01:00

The cover shows the image of a woman, her dress suggesting we might be in the mid-60’s, the light and the grain of the photograph feel like it emerged from a long-forgotten drawer in somebody’s house. But what we notice most of all is the smile of this woman, the quiet amusement she shows below the fake thin moustache drawn over her lips. Inside the book, a private album unfolds in front of us: recurrent faces, places, memories from different times intertwine. We begin to connect imaginary dots among the different people, relationships, mothers and fathers, married couples - and her. A day at the beach, a birthday party, a walk in the woods: the woman in the cover keeps reappearing over and over. The title of the book reads Queen Ann. P. S. Belly cut off, by Dutch artist Mariken Wessels.

Is Ann the name of the woman on the cover? Probably so, and after a few pages she is wearing a wedding dress; then she is holding a glass for a toast, in love. Pages (and years) go by, and we see her face and her body change, gaining weight, losing beauty, the light in her eyes changing. The growing weight of her body is reflected by the weight of a mask of make up on her eyes, by the line of her mouth losing any grace. What happened to her? What was her suffering, who was responsible? Throughout the whole book, we see some photos altered by drawings, childish decorations added on top of her clothes and her face; earlier on, other pictures have details cut off: erased faces, scratches on the surface, a silent and constant struggle with the past and with its memories.

The found photos are reproduced often on a full page or a double spread - overblown, with no borders, enhancing details hidden in those private images now turned into an art object. An envelope concealed between two pages of the book contains a few small prints, bringing us back to what all the content of the book probably used to be, little pieces of paper to hold in the hands. The beauty and the cruelty of photography find in this book the perfect expression of how the can merge into each other: nailing somebody’s image to the factual loss of her past beauty and yet suggesting the inner struggle for some vitality, and the fantasy that, despite everything, can still inhabit somebody’s heart and mind.

Wessels managed to create a fascinating subtext which flows through every single image, like a distant music sweetening even the hardest moments. Through the end, the photographs become increasingly blurred, showing Ann outside, perhaps in a beautiful park, in one photo she seems to smile. The back cover of the book shows her from behind, standing next to a tree, while looking at the bright sky.
After having seen her face so many times in the book, in this last photo we are finally free to imagine her, as she is maybe imagining herself as a different person, while staring at the sun.
After all photography can show the invisible, and appearances can often be deceitful.

- Queen Ann. P.S. Belly Cut Off. By Mariken Wessels. Alauda Publications.

All images © Mariken Wessels/Alauda Publications

Making a Book - Andrew Phelps

2011-01-18T18:35:00.028+01:00

"I smile to think of him out there, cursing to no end, trudging away from his truck to compose that picture of his truck in the mud, capturing the spirit of the whole mess. The sunset simply being the excuse to go".

At the end of last year I asked Andrew Phelps if he wanted to write something about his experience in bookmaking, what a book means to him, what makes him move between large print editions and self published projects.

To me, he seems to be able to perfectly understand how to shape his own projects, the right scale to give to his ideas, when to turn the volume up and when to fade down and dim the lights to give us the perfect fireside feeling for small but intense stories. Such is also the case for his latest book project, Point Sublime, which he created from an inspiring personal story and is also devoted to a noble cause.

Once again, Andrew showed us how serendipity can come to us and create unexpected beauty, after all it is just a matter of looking into the right shoebox.

Enjoy the read.

Thoughts on making a book, by Andrew Phelps

Since 2004 it has become more and more important for me to make books. The process has become as important for me as photographing. I am concentrating on the 2 ends of the spectrum; both the large print-run style of working with a big publisher and at the same time I am producing my own set of limited edition artist books. For me, the two forms are very different and it would be impossible to say which is better or which is more important. They both have advantages and disadvantages. As much as I like the freedom of the self-published books, I also value working with an experienced publishing house when it comes to design, distribution and sales.

Front cover of a dummy for 720

The decision whether to self-publish or go with a big publisher has always been clear to me and determined by the project itself. The bigger projects, meaning the ones which go for years at a time, or that are bigger bodies of work seem to fit the process of working with a publisher. NATURE DE LUXE (Pustet), HIGLEY (Kehrer), and NOT NIIGATA (Kehrer) fall into this category. BAGHDAD SUITE and 720 are projects which I felt fit more to the self-publishing format; conceptual, small print run, a bit abstract.

Front cover and spread from Baghdad Suite

When I start thinking about a book, I begin by printing out all the images simply onto standard paper, not worried about the quality. I then start laying these on the floor. I have found it is best to lay them on the floor running vertically and not horizontally as one might suspect. This seems to mimic the way I see a book. As you walk down the line, the images that will be on the right side of the double page spreads are right above each other and your eye can move directly from one to the other. It is very important how the images on the right sides of the pages follow each other, almost more important than how a double spread works.

Front cover and spread from a dummy for Nature De Luxe

Then, when the order and selection is fixed, I simply bind a dummy of these images so that I can get a feeling for how it will feel. I have only once ever made a dummy cover image which ended up being the actual cover of the book. The cover image seems to take shape as the book comes together.

These early dummies are usually just taped and glued together at first, than after some fine-tuning, I take one to the book binder and have a linen bound dummy made, unless in the case of 720, I knew it would be a soft cover so didn’t bother with the hard binding.

Spreads from dummy and final version of 720

Front cover and prints from a dummy for Higley

Final version of Higley

Front cover of a dummy for Not Niigata, spread and final cover

What I miss most about self publishing the small editions is the off-set printing process. Because the print runs are so small, I have always done them with a digital print and this is of course no comparison to standing in front of the off-set printing machine for 20 hours and watching the sheets as they come out, the noise, making slight adjustments, getting high on the inks. The digital printing process is very clean, steril, silent and almost clinical.

NOT NIIGATA; The printing of. 2009 from Andrew Phelps on Vimeo.

Andrew Phelps "720" from Andrew Phelps on Vimeo.

POINT SUBLIME

The latest project POINT SUBLIME, which is also a digitally printed booklet of 24 pages, is the first time I am bundling a book and print. I have been very successful with the special editions of HIGLEY and NOT NIIGATA when I offered them with a print in a pre-release offer. Each was in an edition of 100, HIGLEY sold out right away, there are still a few NOT NIIGATA left.

So I have decided for this new little self-publication to only make them available with a print. The reason for this decision is a result of the project itself. The images are not made by me but by my father. First off, he doesn’t have any kind of art-market value that he has to worry about diluting with too many images and secondly (and most importantly) is that the reason for this publication is to raise money for cancer research and by adding the print to the deal I can charge more money and thus donate a bigger sum to the cancer research. Besides all of the practical and marketing arguments, the spirit of this project just fits so well as an artist book.

In the summer of 1984 my father drove his Ford F250 alone into Point Sublime, a remote overlook at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. His only objective was to photograph a sunset. On a visit to Arizona last summer I began sorting through thousands of slides, deciding what to scan, what to archive and what to throw out. When I came upon a sheet titled “Sublime”, it wasn’t the sunsets that interested me, but the photographs he never showed me; his truck stuck in the mud, the lonely road, a spooked deer in the woods. I know he will say different, but if you have met my father, you will agree that below his rough outer-surface is a romantic renaissance man. An otherwise practical man, he was inspired to narrate his journey to watch the sun go down. I smile to think of him out there, cursing to no end, trudging away from his truck to compose that picture of his truck in the mud, capturing the spirit of the whole mess. The sunset simply being the excuse to go. So many elements of this trip; travel, solitude, isolation, obsession, reflect the same spirit that I always feel dominates my small artist books. They are these little things that, for some reason, I just feel like I have to do.

Participatory acts

2011-01-10T12:19:00.011+01:00

Peter Ainsworth, Gabe standing on a pile of rubble, Bramley Moore Dock (A5036), 2008

Peter Ainsworth, or photography as a philosophy in images:

"Spring and Summer, 2008, represents the development within my practice of concerns surrounding the peripheral and ephemeral within urban edge space. [...]"

Peter Ainsworth, Kirsty with broiler chicken, Angel Road (A406), 2008

"Similarly in the works informed by Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs, (1559) the protagonist is engaged in an act that seems incongruous with the space. Bruegel's paintings have themes of the absurdity and foolishness of mankind so within the photographs I drew parallels to them with my method of art creation. [...]"

Peter Ainsworth, Summer after Breugel 1568, 2008
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Summer, 1568

"The project became an attempt at naming or categorising and in this capacity the enterprise became quixotic beyond the individual actions depicted within the photographs. The works represent an engagement with a site in flux encompassing issues surrounding social designation of space and action in public spaces by drawing reference from the work of Pieter Bruegel in the enactment and realisation of idealistic, participatory acts."

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559

There is a red light that never goes out

2010-12-30T11:49:00.017+01:00

Let's end this year on a nostalgic note, with Richard Nicholson's Last One Out, a typology of the few remaining professional darkrooms in London.

Sean O'Hagan points out on The Guardian that "perhaps the world is simply too fast-forward now for the craft and the clutter – the roll of film, the negative, the chemicals, the contact sheet – of old-fashioned photographic printing. Perhaps, too, the darkroom and photographic film will go the way of the analogue recording studio, the cassette player and the vinyl record and become beloved by a relatively small group of obsessives".

Other examples of photographic obituaries of the analog art are Michel Campeau's Darkroom and Robert Burley's The disappearance of Darkness.

It's something that has been said many times over the last years, and maybe this is already happening, analog printing is already a niche, small but somehow healthy: it's not a big business, not a widespread profession, but something where craft, meditation, fun or whatever else somebody might feel inside when, full of excitement, turns off the light in a basement and start messing around with easels and trays.

I've always had mixed feelings for elegiac photoworks about the diappearance of analog photography, I think that the beauty of it is in its results and there is not much that can come out by turning it into a vintage visual object in itself.

Now it's all computers everybody says, and maybe one difference with the darkroom is that those analog tools from back then made sense only when able hands could take something out of them, while today's devices and techniques often seem to turn into instant cult objects or fetishes, no matter what the real use or outcome that can be achieved with them.

On this topic, I suggest to read my interview with b&w fine art printer Jim Megargee.

So, paradoxically we celebrate objects from a supposed distant era as lost glories, but today's objects are probably even bigger fetishes, and are constantly replaced by new ones. Objects are losing endurance these days, and a technological device doesn't seem to age with the grace of something made of steel and springs.

So I guess a new year's resolution could be stopping mourning about analog photography, and maybe start looking in what it is actually becoming. Rather than another sad story about how all is getting digital and cold, I'd rather hear about how some people happily keep using the darkroom, what they get from it, why they keep doing it, and so forth.

I'll be happy to receive darkroom stories by all of you out there.

Happy 2011 to everybody!

UPDATE: as soon as I've put this post online, I've found a story on the New York Times that I thought I should include: For Kodachrome Fans, Road Ends at Photo Lab in Kansas.

All images taken from Last One Out © Richard Nicholson

'Coin operated' - A review of 'Dear Knights and Dark Horses', by Thomas Roma

2010-12-20T11:55:00.015+01:00

For many, the role of photography in building the great book of history is still to produce icons of our time, images that can sum up the essence of a moment - defining pictures. We need to see the events in the photographs, we need to receive them like a gift from the photographer. History often cannot afford ambiguity, lack of clarity, or worse lack of force in a photograph: hence strong subjects, strong moments, strong composition. Drama, intensity and a clear message are the usual requirements for the narration of real life, the same ones needed for a good popular fictional story, after all. Moviemakers often fear silence, as it might make them lose the attention of the viewers - they need to be entertained, after all.

The war in Iraq is of course one of the major photographic dramas of the last decade, and we’ve seen it covered in all fashions: soldiers shooting, women in desperation, children crying, towers of smoke, humvees cruising the desert.

What remains unclear in all this is the role of the viewer: are we meant to be entertained, informed, shocked? Are we considered as just passive receivers of pre-packaged content or is there some space to feel something through those photographs, to imagine what goes beyond (or lies behind) the things we are shown?

Dear Knights and Dark Horses, the latest book by Thomas Roma, attempts to address that question in a somehow radical way: the photographs are divided in two sections, the first showing a sequence of old coin-operated horse rides in the streets of New York, while the second presents a series of portraits of US Army Reserve soldiers about to be deployed to Iraq. Rather than raising awareness through showing strong content, Roma asks the viewer to fill the empty space between these two worlds, the old-fashioned and now neglected kids’ entertainment and his subdued portraits of militaries, stripped of both any heroic appearance or dramatic setting.

Even if the association of these two opposite worlds leaves space for a rather obvious metaphoric effect, Roma still manages to create an interesting visual experience, with a photographic language reduced to the essential, a sober black and white supported by a very simple framing. The coin horses are almost merely recorded, collected from the streets into images who seem as casual as the occasional distracted glances these forgotten toys now get from passers-by; the soldiers photographs look like placid snapshots, straight portraits of men whose eyes are so difficult to penetrate, almost expressionless and yet full of the weight of a choice we might never fully understand.

The book itself appears like a small delicate object, almost square, with a gentle hardcover and a pretty simple graphic design: reminding the style of children books in its appearance, Dear Knights and Dark Horses calls for the viewer’s imagination and sensibility to re-imagine events we have been hearing over and over, inviting us to listen to a melancholic fairy tale in black and white to rediscover the story of a war we always see so full of colours and sounds that we might have become blind and deaf to it.

Dear Knights and Dark Horses. Photographs by Thomas Roma. Introduction by Alec Wilkinson. powerHouse Books, New York, 2010. 100 pp., 35 duotone illustrations, 6¾x7¾".

"Home is where nobody is"

2010-12-13T19:05:00.010+01:00

"Private mythologies" is the expression used by Mirko Smerdel to describe his work: a visual archive made of memories, of icons of our times, of images layered one on top of the other. Can we ever experience something like an unconditioned vision, or are we always pushed back to what we already saw, to what we remember, to how we decided things have to look like?

Using found photographs, postcards, newspapers and all the other byproducts of our visual past, Smerdel chose to wander accross the many roads of a "mental geography of contemporary life", an atlas of our endless iconic production, which we might never really learn how to read.

(thanks to Andrea Botto)

All images © Mirko Smerdel

Yaakov Israel - Thoughts on a repressed lansdcape

2010-12-02T12:16:00.022+01:00

"What happens to a landscape which is intentionally ignored by a large part of the population? Does it still exist?"

A few weeks ago I got in touch with Yaakov Israel and I was immediately fascinated by his investigation of the Israeli landscape and its human geography. I asked him if he wanted to have a conversation about his photography, his country and all that happens when the two come together, and I am happy he agreed to share his thoughts.

Enjoy the read.

FABIO SEVERO: Israel is a territory many photographers would put all their efforts to show it loud and clear in their images, and yet you say you are interested in showing all those small details that usually go unnoticed. What brought you to work in this way?

YAAKOV ISRAEL: My current interest in photography revolves around the idea of using this medium to research and understand the culture and country I live in and which I am constantly trying to analyze and better understand.
I am a firm believer in personal biography and the affect it has on ones interests, work and subject matter. I am 100% Israeli, born and raised in Israel, while on the other hand I am the son of immigrants. My father never really assimilated into the Israeli society and was always observing and pointing out social injustices and Israeli idiosyncrasies. This influenced my way of looking at my surroundings and this is what enables me to simultaneously be part of the Israeli reality and still question it.
As a result of my visual research I have discovered that we have a lot to learn from what we inflict on our surroundings and the way we chose to construct the reality around us. The focusing on details unravels part of a story that could never be told as a whole.

FS: One of your project is called The legitimacy of landscape, but maybe this expression can be extensively used for the totality of your work: to use photography to unveil the fake seamlessness of a landscape, to interrogate its nature and its history, its legitimacy. What does this term really mean to you?

YI: I have always been interested in the land and the way people connect to their land. Thoughts about the traditions and of the meaning of landscape in art and photography, worldwide and locally, occupy me constantly in my work.
For me the question explored in this work was; what happens to a landscape which is intentionally ignored by a large part of the population? Does it still exist?
This lead to a series of queries about physical vs. perceived vs. imaginary existences and it is this legitimacy that I ended up exploring in my work.
In a way each photo created an existence of a place and gave it a fleeting legitimacy even if imaginary.

FS: The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey is described as a wide exploration of your land, in search of a man, of a feeling, of an idea, maybe. A wide search in a small land, you wrote, where any wandering would have brought you back to the starting point, to begin again and look for new images. Is it a survey of a territory or rather the expression of a private geography you found inside yourself?

YI: I started out purely on a mission to survey a territory – Israel. However on the day I crossed paths with the man on the white donkey this journey turned into a personal quest. From then on my external travels reverted inwards and I started to explore myself in relation to my surroundings. I feel that this was a crucial turning point which made me understand that my work does not only document and show reality, but in a way creates a reality.

FS: Among all the photography produced about Israel, what is it that you don't like, and also which are the photographic works that you loved most? Is there any aspect of your country that you feel is not enough explored (or maybe even ignored) by photography?

YI: Personally I find that the main Israeli photographic narrative that makes it out of Israel is the journalistic, political photography. This is obviously important but it portrays only one aspect of Israel and thus helps create a very stereotypical image.
There are many other realities being documented in Israeli photography that are not ignored but simply not exposed. Naturally I find interesting the work of fellow contemporaries who are using photography to question, and not to make statements.

FS: How was your work received domestically as opposed to abroad?

YI: Domestically I have been received well. My work instigated the interest and debates I hoped for. When I have the opportunity to present my work abroad I find that the pre-conceptions regarding Israel must first be broken down and in a way my work is what helps do this. I find that the interest in Israel is always strong and that my work provides them with new insight.

FS: You use a 8x10 camera for your projects. Why did you choose this kind of camera?

YI: When I started out in photography I was fascinated with the ability of the medium to render and capture an accurate piece of reality and it was this power that I wanted to use. As I progressed and started to find 'my way' in photography I understood that I wanted to use photography to create a discussion about reality, and the way in which I wanted to show things was just as important as what I had to say and point out. This is why I chose to use the most descriptive tools available and why I mainly use an 8x10, as it promises me the hyper realistic results which I need in order to show details more sharply than would be possible to observe with the naked eye.

Yaakov Israel, A Repressed Landscape, The Open Museum of Photography at Tel-Hai Industrial Park, July 2005

All images © Yaakov Israel

Alien memories

2010-11-17T09:34:00.013+01:00

Simone Bergantini, American Standard (Remix), 2010.

"This work was carried out re-elaborating a group of 4x5 inch negatives bought in a second hand shop in Brooklyn. They were taken between the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties very probably by the same person within an area which is relatively near New York City.

I lived in the United States for 5 months and I decided to talk about what struck me most about the American people, consumerism and its consequent individualism. Use and throw away, no stratifying, always starting from scratch."

"Well, it was a big country, there was some of it for everyone. There were women, there was land, there was money. But nobody had enough, nobody stopped no matter how much he had, and the fields, even the vineyards, looked like public gardens, fake flower beds like those at railway stations, or else wilderness, burned-over land, mountains of slag. It wasn't a country where you could resign yourself, rest your head and say to others: 'For better or worse, you know me. For better or worse, let me live.' That was the frightening part."

(Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires)

"Questo lavoro è stato realizzato remissando un gruppo di negativi 4x5 (inch) acquistati in un negozio di oggetti usati di Brooklyn, scattati tra la fine degli anni 50 e l’inizio degli anni 60 ed eseguiti con molta probabilità dalla stessa mano in un' area relativamente vicina alla città di New York.

Ho vissuto 5 mesi negli Stati Uniti e ho deciso di raccontare ciò che più mi ha colpito del popolo americano, il consumismo e l'individualismo conseguente. Usare e gettare, non stratificare, ri-azzerare il passato."

"Eppure il paese era grande, ce n’era per tutti. C’erano donne, c’era terra, c’era denari. Ma nessuno ne aveva abbastanza, nessuno per quanto ne avesse si fermava, e le campagne, anche le vigne, sembravano giardini pubblici, aiuole finte come quelle delle stazioni, oppure incolti, terre bruciate, montagne di ferraccio. Non era un paese che uno potesse rassegnarsi, posare la testa e dire agli altri: “Per male che vada mi conoscete. Per male che vada lasciatemi vivere”. Era questo che faceva paura."

(Cesare Pavese, La luna e i falò)

All images © Simone Bergantini

Emotional landscapes

2010-11-15T10:59:00.001+01:00

The beach where we spent all our childhood, the valley where we dream to run free, the landscape we wish we could stare, the mountain we maybe hiked years ago, the creek we dream we could paint, the village of many boring summers, the seascape we wish we would have photographed ourselves.

Paolo Bernabini, Cahier de Voyage.

La spiaggia dove abbiamo passato tutta l'infanzia, la vallata dove avremmo potuto correre liberi, il paesaggio che vorremmo guardare, la montagna che forse abbiamo scalato anni fa, il ruscello che vorremmo dipingere, la piazzetta di tante noiose estati, il mare che avremmo voluto fotografare.

Paolo Bernabini, Cahier de Voyage.

All images © Paolo Bernabini

Liar

2010-11-11T09:59:00.017+01:00

rough study for a double portrait, 2009

Photography can be considered as the mere surface on which Lucas Blalock finally creates his own images: I would not write more than that to introduce his work, also because his latest book, I Believe You, Liar, is introduced by a letter that is perhaps impossible to match with any other word:

untitled, 2010

"Dear Ms. Patty Pacifica or Current Resident,

I like to think of cooing. it is among the warmer thoughts. especially nice in French which seems a warmer language except when it’s not. Isn’t it funny how cold warm things used badly become. I would accept your TV if you had it, but seem truly and earnestly (to my own embarrassment) more interested in truth than fact and all that uninterrupted information would bring us back to the palimpsest (a screen) and a possible becoming tedious because the volume controls of strangers – even friends and lovers – are always different from the ones internal. It’s probably better if I listen to your speakers instead of getting greedy for headphones, or serialized programming.

As to. . . all of this is more lonely than sad but I am starting to relish this energy of impossible languages and unbridgeable gaps. The failures are all we have and I am no nihilist! I BELIEVE YOU, LIAR!! Light, sad? ‘luc’ is particle and wave both at the same time. I am torn. can you explain?

Thank you kindly,

Lucas Blalock"

Making a Book - 'Conditions', by Andrés Marroquin Winkelmann

2010-11-09T08:00:00.007+01:00

As many of you probably already know, Conditions is the first book by Andrés Marroquin Winkelmann, and it also marks the debut of Meier und Müller (there's only a few copies left of the book, find info here), the publishing house Andrés has recently founded with Jörg M Colberg.

Having in mind to start a blog section devoted to illustrate the art of book-making, a few weeks ago I asked Andrés to write a text about the genesis of Conditions, which is the first of a series of contributions on the process of creating a photobook that will come in the following months.

I could have written myself a review of the book, but I had the feeling that a chronicle of all the thoughts, ideas, intuitions and mistakes it takes to finally bring a photographic volume to light would have been somehow more interesting than my two cents on the project.

Conditions is a special object, a concept trying to change a few things in the way we can interact with a photobook; it is also a delicate story, made of moments and feelings so thin it takes nothing to sweep them away. That's why maybe its fragile images are concealed behind the firm black gate that closes the book in itself. I'll let Andrés himself open it to show us what's inside.

CONDITIONS, by Andrés Marroquin Winkelmann

The first time Conditions was presented as a book to a wider audience was at the Ostkreuz School graduation exhibition in Berlin in late 2008. The design was simple: the images were printed in two sizes and presented in a rather straightforward fashion. For this first version of the book, I primarily focused on the rhythm and sequencing of the images in order to create a consistent personal narrative, which, I felt, worked OK.

In general, finding the suitable presentation of a body of work takes a long time. I always try several variations, with different papers, frames, sizes, to finally decide how to arrange photographs on the wall. With time, I’ve learned how to deal with this as a whole, so that the main idea of the project is reflected in its presentation, be it as book or in a show. I still remember how weeks after my graduate show I was re-designing the book. There was something that simply was not right, yet.

The conjuncture took place about a year ago. My ideas about books were changing, and I realized I had many books which I would only come back to once or maybe twice after buying them. There were only a few books that really drew me in deeply, and they were still exciting every time I looked at them. Even though there are many books with very strong contents, I had the feeling that often the book format wasn’t being used right. The photobook market has grown so rapidly over the past few years that it seems that often, just having a book out seems to be what matters for photographers. The production of a book is nowadays so straightforward that many photographers replace their portfolio with a book. However, I think that the purpose of producing a book should not be convenience. There are actually only very few publishers who really try to work hand in hand with the photographers to produce books that fit the work.

I met Jörg (Colberg) for the first time about five years ago at ICP in New York City. We met almost every time I came back to the States after that, and we slowly we realized we had more in common than just our taste in music. We became friends, and we happened to understand each other not only on a “photography” level but also on a personal one. He has been my “partner in crime” ever since. Our ideas about photobook making are very similar; and after checking whether we really were in the same boat, we decided to found Meier und Müller.

In the beginning, I wasn’t so sure about making Conditions the first book of our publishing project. But Jörg pushed me to redesign the book to reveal the ideas behind the series. Without telling me what to do, he helped me understand the connection between form and contents - all of the sudden, everything was crystal clear.

The earliest designs I tried were very gimmicky. I did not want the book (or the series) being carried by the design, I did not want the design to be just a trick to make the work interesting. After some tests, and after having looked at older dummies I decided to experiment with the parameters of the book format, pushing the boundaries. I started to center on ideas concerning self-determination, the decisions we made, still make, and those we did not dare to make.

Investigating identity is the main idea behind the project. The way Conditions in the end was conceived as a book allows the viewer to question and study her or his own identity in a very natural way. The book itself help the viewer to deal with perceptions, with how we look at people and how we would like to look at them.

After months of intensive (and to be honest, often very painful) work Conditions was born. I went to New York to meet Adam Bartos, who shared with us his experience and vision and who also took care of the editing.

The book has been out for two months now, and the editions are almost sold out. The press has been very positive, and we are very happy about that. Currently, Jörg and myself are working on upcoming projects, and we couldn’t be more motivated to push this venture into the next level. Making photobooks is a lot of work, it’s hard, but when everything finally comes together, it’s just a thrill that’s very hard to describe.

All images © Andrés Marroquin Winkelmann/Meier und Müller

Demonology

2010-11-08T11:14:00.012+01:00

Pardon me for the lack of fantasy, but when I see images of eerie landscapes, scary corners of grim huts, rusty sharp tools and figures standing sinisterly with their faces aginst the wall, I can think of only one expression to sum it all: blair witchy.

Welcome to Grant Willing's world, you might not want to explore it at night, alone.

Perdonatemi la mancanza di fantasia, ma quando vedo paesaggi stregati, angoli bui di strane baracche o personaggi sinistramente rivolti con la faccia al muro, mi viene in mente una sola immagine in grado di descrivere quello che vedo: blair witch.

Benevenuti nel mondo di Grant Willing, fareste bene a starne alla larga quando fa notte, e siete soli.

All images taken from Svart Metall © Grant Willing

Room for thoughts

2010-11-02T11:07:00.015+01:00

To me photo courses have always been parallel worlds where people could reinvent their destiny, their ambitions, their dreams, even if just for a few days or weeks. Nobody can deny the beauty of an industrious bunch of people operating photogear in search of the perfect shot, while some others are scratching their chins with a pensive look in their eyes, striving to find the perfect combination of sense and sensibility. Not to mention the collective protfolio viewings, where each of the photophiles shares the fruit of their labour with the rest of the group, in a solemn atmosphere punctuated by extremely serious and deep comments, pronounced with a delicate voice, like in a ceremony.
The photo course is one of those places where the outside world can disappear, a bubble out of our ordinary time, a reign for the imagination, where creativity feels close and the burden of practical life finally stops haunting us for a day, a week, a year.

With his work The Photo Course, Martin Cregg explores the empty spaces of his classes of History and Theory of Photography, taking photographs of what he calls "post-lecture environments". I love the expression, it makes me wonder if the thoughts expressed can leave traces in the room where they have been pronounced, or if the air can carry signs of the struggle of the students' minds to grasp those floating concepts.

If you wonder why I ask myself this kind of questions, well the answer is mostly here.

All images © Martin Cregg

Yannick Bouillis - On self-publishing

2010-10-27T10:45:00.004+02:00

Self-publishing is an expanding phenomenon in the world of photography. The current year has seen a remarkable spreading of activities in the field, with new publishing houses, festivals, workshops and new online platforms opening very fast. I felt it was time to try to examine some of the issues related with self-publishing and photography, and thought that a good start could have been a conversation with Yannick Bouillis, creator of the upcoming Offprint event, "a project space for contemporary photography and a book fair for independent publishers".

Offprint will be from November 18 to November 21, 2010, at Espace Kiron, 10 rue de la Vacquerie, 75011 Paris, France.

Enjoy the read.

FABIO SEVERO: What is the genesis of the Offprint project?

YANNICK BOUILLIS: Strangely, I don’t remember the genesis of Offprint... One morning I got up and realised that the day before I had started Offprint. No hangover, no psychological disorders, so I had to conclude I did it for a good reason, but which one I can’t tell: I just don’t remember.

One of the contextual reasons is that at the time I was trying to determine which is the best scene for photography, crossing out multiple criteria and factors (documentary photography / fashion photography / non documentary photography / graphic design scene / best schools / best museums / best magazines... etc).

While trying to set a hierarchy, I also realised I had a nice list of publishing companies, a sort of "best publishers’ list" in the world - and thought I could do a fair showing what they do.

Uta Eisenreich, Wonderyears, 2008

FS: Self-publishing in photograpy seems to have grown exponentially during the last year, or maybe it is the visibility of several activities in this field that gained an increased reception. What do you think really happened?

YB: You are right that it is difficult to know if self publishing has really increased over the last few years or it was just his visibility (speed of information is impressive since the Internet) but fulfilling a prophecy is always a good concept to explain reality: the more you see things being published, the more you believe it is the reality of photography, the more you want to join - the more you join!

Photobooks have always been around in photography, like Martin Parr and Gerry Badger have shown - one of the reasons being probably the historical lack of institutions to show photo works: photography museums are something very recent - and still rare. In a way, photobooks have always played a substitute to the lack of spaces for photography - and photobooks keep being the best exhibition photographers can get. Or at least, one very much complementary with museum spaces.

If you compare the situation with the artist books scene, you definitely see the publication as this substitute to exhibitions: it is nowadays almost impossible for artists to show their works the way they would want to show them in a museum. They have to deal systematically with the Contemporary Art curatorial obsession to replace your work into a theory, a trend, a school, their own view on your works... But few artists can claim to see their work shown in his full integrity and meaning in an art space nowadays. Artist books are probably for artists a way to keep the meaning of their work intact – and the same happens in photography, too: photobooks show the work of photographers. This happens in contemporary art because of the theoretical obsession, but in photography it is just because of the historical lack of museums spaces. Even the relationship between curators and photographers is pretty sane compared to the one in the contemporary art field.

Hans Gremmen, Jaap Scheeren, Fake Flowers, 2008

FS: How do you think mainstream or widely diffused publishing houses are reacting to this? Is there any kind of interaction between the independent world and the large scale editorial projects?

YB: When people will have enough of the self publishing trend (rough, badly printed, using a 2 colors printing system, risograph etc...which I love like the hell), they will get back to more established publishing houses with beautifully printed books....if everyone keeps doing the self publishing stuff, within 2 years, classical publishing houses will be super hot!

FS: Which are the main tendencies in the self publishing world today? Is it mostly focused on experimenting on book designing or do you also see new tendencies in the photographic languages, styles and subject matters developed in the books?

YB: I don’t see any new tendencies in the photographic languages that can be specifically linked to the self-publishing scene.

As a general trend, non documentary photography is getting very strong of course (Germany, The Netherlands, USA), but I would say that the self-publishing scene is more experimenting the link between "publication" and "photography", than leading a formal investigation in the photographic language. I am even sometimes very disappointed by some works - but not by the publications that feature them. I have seen enough great photobooks published by average photographers to be sure of that. In that sense, the contemporary dialogue between photography and publishing process that you are mentioning, well in the self publishing scene it is probably more about the emergence of a new person (or at least, the acknowledgement of this figure), and that is the graphic designer, than something really, formally new. In the role of "confident", publishers tend to be replaced by graphic designers. That's why Offprint is not only for photographers but also for graphic designers: I really believe in their fructuous collaboration. Besides the technical aspects of Offprint - organising a fair - it is also a statement that I want to make.

Jaap Scheeren, 3 Roses, 9 Ravens, 12 Months, 2009

FS: You’re also behind Shashin Books.

YB: Shashin is a bookshop for Dutch publications (art, graphic design, photography...). In November 2010, we have Offprint. Next year a contemporary art book fair in Amsterdam (2011). And the year after, a mix of galleries / publishers / project spaces.

FS: What made you choose to set up Offprint in Paris during the same days of Paris Photo? Is it just a matter of convenience to draw that audience to your fair or is it also a way to send a message to the established photographic world?

YB: Without Paris photo, Offprint would not be possible. Year after year they have been able to make Paris one of the photo event of the year - Paris Photo is crowded and it is my responsibility to make Offprint crowded for the publishers who have accepted to join. Paris Photo is priceless in that sense.

Contentwise, Paris Photo is what it is, very much average. This is also an interesting issue for photography: while leading Contemporary Art fairs like Art Basel, Armory Show, Frieze are very much succeeding in showing established artists, photo fairs are not able to do it at all: if you make a list with the 50 best photographers in the world, you would hardly find more than 5 photographers represented at Paris Photo; while almost all the established artists are represented in leading Art fairs. And it is worse when you list 50 emerging talents in photography, you won’t find probably any at Paris photo, while you would find probably 30-40 emerging artists at Art Basel, Frieze or the Armory Show. The worst of the worst is that major photographers (with few exceptions, of course) are actually not shown in photo fairs anymore, but in Contemporary Art Fairs! Of course, Paris Photo itself is not responsible for this - they know what’s going on very well - but it shows how the photography world is still very immature.

Eric van der Weijde, Obersalzberg, 2008

FS: And why Paris Photo would miss this goal of showcasing a wide choice of leading and emerging photographers?

YB: Paris Photo simply follows the average taste of the photo crowd. Photography world is very much dogmatic and conservative - probably because it is a recent art, and still insecure about its forces. I am also working in contemporary art and I see how people dare to lead formal investigations.

The last couple of years have seemed to show that there might be no real need of photographs anymore, but a growing need for videos – we have witnessed a shift from the paper format to an online format. Online publishers need videos, not photographs; if you add this very big problem to the fact that contemporary art spaces and fairs are more and more willing to show photographs, then you can imagine that the photo crowd will deal more and more with left-over photographers, Sunday photographers. I don’t know a single photo-student from the Netherlands who wants to be in a photography gallery, they only want to be in art galleries... slowly photography is becoming a 20th century thing.

There is of course something strange in the fact that the some of the best photographers in the world meet up in a country with a great history in photography, but a very poor contemporary photo scene: in that sense, that Offprint is organised during Paris photo, and by a French, can give the wrong signal about Offprint and its intentions. Offprint does not want to be considered as "French", because honesty obliges to say that photography is nowadays very strong in Germany, Swiss, Netherlands, UK, USA... but not in France anymore. Paris is the location, not an influence for me.

Make a selection of the best museums / best photographers / best photobooks every year and count... Germany, Swiss, Netherlands, UK, USA... I think those countries are leading countries for photography.

But Paris is an illusion, isn’t it?

Uta Eisenreich, Network, Teamwork, 2002

Lonely heartland

2010-10-21T17:17:00.013+02:00

Wikipedia reports the following facts about the town of St. Charles, Virginia:

"St. Charles is located at 36°48′14″N 83°3′26″W / 36.80389°N 83.05722°W / 36.80389; -83.05722 (36.803858, -83.057208).

According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 0.2 square miles (0.4 km²), all of it land. [...]

As of the census of 2000, there were 159 people, 61 households, and 43 families residing in the town. The population density was 962.3 people per square mile (361.1/km²). There were 72 housing units at an average density of 435.8/sq mi (163.5/km²).

The racial makeup of the town was 99.37% White and 0.63% Asian."

On top of this, an extended use of Oxycontin is reported, the heroin surrogate also known as Hillbilly Heroin.

Swedish photographer Hanna Modigh spent two months in St Charles and photographed the lives inhabiting this bitter corner of rural America. Her work Hillbilly Heroin Honey adds indeed a touch of sweetness to their stories and their faces, bathing almost everything and everybody in a soft and gentle light in which the eyes of those people still shine, and it feels like they can still smile, and maybe they can still love.

All images taken from Hillbilly Heroin Honey © Hanna Modigh

Infra-ordinary

2010-10-19T09:45:00.014+02:00

"What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed on order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?

Describe your street. Describe another. Compare."

— Georges Perec, L'Infra-ordinaire

From a certain perspective, Perec sounds like the patron saint of all photographers. Arturo Soto would be a devoted of his cult for sure, especially with his latest work Some Windows Later, a small ode to all the interstitial worlds inside the ordinariness of daily life.

"Ciò che dobbiamo interrogare, sono i mattoni, il cemento, il vetro, le nostre maniere a tavola, i nostri utensili, i nostri strumenti, i nostri orari, i nostri ritmi. Interrogare ciò che sembra aver smesso per sempre di stupirci. Viviamo, certo, respiriamo, certo; camminiamo, apriamo porte, scendiamo scale, ci sediamo intorno a un tavolo per mangiare, ci corichiamo in un letto per dormire. Come? Dove? Quando? Perché?

Descrivete la vostra strada. Descrivetene un’altra. Fate il confronto."

— Georges Perec, L'Infra-ordinaire

Da un certo punto di vista Perec è un po' il santo protettore dei fotografi, e sicuramente Arturo Soto ne è un devoto, specialmente con il suo ultimo lavoro Some Windows Later, una piccola ode ai micro-mondi nascosti tra le fessure della nostra vita quotidiana.

All images © Arturo Soto

Critical eye

2010-10-18T11:20:00.008+02:00

How we see, how we represent the world we live in, how this world is experienced (and shaped) according to paradigms: all this and lots more meta-linguistic musings inspire multimedia artist Alexandre Maubert, or as he introduces his own work, "photography - video - interactive system - electronic music".

Il modo in cui vediamo, come rappresentiamo il mondo in cui viviamo, come questo mondo viene vissuto (e modellato) sulla base di paradigmi: tutto questo e molte altre riflessioni metalinguistiche ispirano il lavoro di Alexandre Maubert, artista multimediale che, come lui stesso descrive, spazia tra "fotografia - video - sistemi interattivi - musica elettronica".

All images © Alexandre Maubert

New beginnings

2010-10-18T00:03:00.001+02:00

The Labradoodle

"My name is Alec Soth. I live in Minnesota. I like to take pictures and make books. I have a Labradoodle. I also have a business called Little Brown Mushroom."

With the usual understatement, Alec Soth introduces himself on his brand new website, where, among other things, presents his latest body of work Broken Manual, which at first glance feels exactly like what you would expect from an accomplished photographer still in love with what he does: fresh, rich and restless.

Image taken from Broken Manual © Alec Soth

Automotive beauty

2010-10-14T10:11:00.009+02:00

New Eagle Garage, Rotterdam, 2009

Garage, by Jan Adriaans:

"My project started in Cairo (Egypt) where I was fascinated by the enormous amount of cars in the city. In contrast with the Netherlands, cars, often old and full of scratches, are repaired outside the garages in the street. Significant is that all car-workshops are very small and very specialised. The upholstery of car seats is situated next to the car mechanic and the car radio specialist. This way the car can stay outside and the mechanics move from one car to the other, until the whole car is fixed."

Prestige Garage, Rotterdam, 2010

"The metamorphosis of the damaged car into one as good as new is like a healing process, an almost physical sensation. Inside in the garages, the spaces look like installations where the repaired product is hung on the wall like it has special powers. In my photography the adoration of the shining car material is the main subject."

Downtown Garage, Cairo, 2008

All images © Jan Adriaans