Monday 30 March 2009

helen levitt




Helen Levitt, whose photography caught 'fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quite drama' on the streets of her native New York, died at home in Manhattan on Sunday.

In his preface to Levitt's book,  A Way of Seeing, James Agee wrote 'Like most good artists, Miss Levitt is no intellectual and no theorist; she works, quite simply, where she feels most at home, and that, naturally enough, is where the kind of thing that moves and interests her is likely to occur most naturally and in best abundance'.

'The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual world, and to make an undisturbed and faithful record of the instant in which this movement of creativeness achieves its most expressive crystallization.'

For a retrospective of her work, see Helen Levitt: New York Streets 1938 to 1990s at lensculture and obituary in the Guardian by Amanda Hopkinson

Thursday 19 March 2009

the grain of voice



Photography and the Grain of the Voice is an exhibition by 19 students from the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, Germany, curated by Dr Wiebke Leister. The work was exhibited at the London College of Communication last week where it was received as an extremely accomplished and thought provoking body of work.

The photographers were asked to consider Roland Barthes' 1972 essay 'The Grain of Voice' as a lietmotif in the production of work that considered photography as performative. How in making the work the photographer becomes involved in an active engagement with the question of what a photographic voice can be and how it can relate to ideas of authorship in the making of and the thinking about photography.

The students posed many different questions in the process of producing the work - Who is speaking? And who is looking? What is the character of the author? Is there an element of fictional self portraiture involved? What kind of timbre does the visual voice have? What do we imagine off frame?

The photographers were attempting to find a gesture in their art that reached out to the viewer .... 'The 'grain',' for Barthes, 'is in the body, in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.' 

I was asked to review the work of Johanna Kopp who produced a series of poetic portraits titled 'About Closeness'. Johanna is a sensitive artist who by looking intimately at gesture, facial expression, gaze and posture pared down the elements to capture a private moment of internalization and contemplation. 

Taking, as a starting point, Barthes' description of the skill of a particular harpsicordist who was able to communicate a tremor from her inner body in her music  - Johanna's project was a search for a way of making portraiture that touched on an interior moment. An attempt at a 'moment of truth', a shared moment of equilibrium.

We talked about Bettina von Zwehl's work - how she sets up a controlled situation in order to elicit a very private human emotion (Fur Alina), and Rineke Dijskstra, who also waits for a particular moment in which to photograph. In all there is a paring down of gesture and pose, a search for an internal moment, and a desire to become systematic and detached in order to reach that moment of non pose.

We also discussed how photographers project themselves on to their subject, the images are in fact self portraits, where an intimate moment is shared between the photographer and the subject.

The Grain of the Voice was an impressive body of work which drew on different readings of Barthes multi-layered text. I was particularly drawn to pared down palette of  Anne Lena Michel's still lives in The Attempt of a Transformation of an Immediate Vicinity and the retro wit of Philip Ullrich's Next time it will be about the Solar System. Finally, a special mention for Philipp Gallon whose failed equation for building a grain enhancement machine was replaced with a grain of the self in Assuming a pose could reveal an expression of failure, when it is a neutral one. I was moved by this young artist's sincerity.

Thursday 12 March 2009

cia de foto





Cia de Foto's video and photography montage was banned by the council at Derby's Format Festival last weekend but shown at the Photographer's Gallery on wednesday.

Members of the San Paulo based photo bureau live together and work in such a way that the singular author is rejected in favor of the collective. 

All images are credited to Cia de Foto regardless of who actually took a picture. Pio Figueiroa described how the photographers work in a collaborative way that makes it 'impossible for us to know who to credit individually.' 

Post production (significantly in this group - a female domain) is regarded as important as taking the pictures.


Sunday 8 March 2009

a shimmer of possibility



Pittsburg (Man cutting grass), 2004 
from a shimmer of possibility, Paul Graham/steidlMACK


'Perhaps instead of standing by the river bank scooping out water, it's better to immerse yourself in the current, and watch how the river comes up, flows smoothly around your presence, and gently reforms on the other side like you were never there.'
Paul Graham


British photographer Paul Graham, currently shortlisted for the Deutsche Borse Photography prize alongside Emily Jacir, Tod Papageorge and Taryn Simon, commented on his best shot in the Guardian

Graham was nominated for a shimmer of possibility inspired by Chekhov's short stories. The work comprises 12 individual books in each volume a story of everyday American life is told in a small sequence of images. At times the quiet narrative breaks unexpectedly into a sublime moment - such as the moment above when Graham describes 'the sun burst through, and the rain came down, and every drop was illuminated.'

'A 'great shot' is the antithesis of what this work is about. It's about appreciating the flow of the moment, the rhythm and currents and the eddies of life, rather than neatly packaging the world into perfectly formed little jewels.'

I am interested in Graham's portrayal of the mundane moments of life that seem 'worthless' but, as he says, 'they form and shape our lives'.

A recent Q&A with Paul Graham published on PDN offers some provocative thoughts on documentary photography and how it is perceived in the art world. I have taken one quote, see below, for the full article follow the link above.

'My point is simply that the art world is traditionally attuned to perceiving what the artist "created", which in photography usually means that they pick up more on work with a synthetic quality - constructed scenes, Tableaux Vivants, staged pieces - these fit neater into this expectation and fit into the broader art world model of "what artists do" much more easily. However, the great photography which operates at the core of the medium - from Frank to Eggleston to Shore to Winogrand - doesn't fit that model, as it is taken from life directly, unscripted and unforced. That creates problems and is often misunderstood or marginalized as 'documentary or 'observational', Now nobody in their right mind can deny the power of what Frank did, or the best of Eggleston, or Robert Adams, but sadly there's a lot of folks that don't get it, and prefer the traditional model.

Having said that .... there's a lot of blame to lay in the photography community itself, for the plain dumbness and lack of discrimination that burdens the medium. We should fight that and be smarter and more discriminating in what we do, say and promote. It's an incredible medium, alive and direct, but we need to engage our hearts and minds in aspiring to make truly great work, that puts any doubts beyond reach.'

Paul Graham

Sunday 1 March 2009

the day Bourgeois moved me to tears



The female of the species ... views of a series of paintings
entitled Femme Maison by Louise Bourgeois


I just stumbled across Will Gompertz's article in the Guardian 8th October 2008 on the impact of walking round the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at Tate Modern last October.  

'All the Femme Maison (literally house woman/housewife) paintings share the same idea. In each one, a woman has a house covering her head, below which her naked body protrudes. She thinks she is safe and secure in her domestic prison, because that is all she can see around her. She has no idea that she is flashing her genitals to all and sundry, more vulnerable than ever. It's the stuff of nightmares where you are publicly exposed and shamed. These paintings succinctly sum up the struggle of every woman and their destiny to live with the responsibilities and constrictions of trying to maintain the balance of wife, mother and housekeeper while trying to retain a semblance of individuality in such sapping domestic circumstances. The simplicity of the paintings adds to the sense of entrapment; there wasn't the time for anything more studied or crafted.'