MAGNUM CONTACT SHEETS

I recently had the pleasure of seeing the 'Magnum Contact Sheets' exhibition at the Amerika Haus, in Berlin, which recently opened its doors once more. It consists of each generation of the Magnum photographers, beginning in the first days when it hurled this collective into our insatiable world, the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger, William Vandivert and David 'Chim' Seymour, in 1947. Since its birth, it lists some of the greatest twentieth century photographers as its members, many of which are shown at the exhibition, as the viewer is confronted with over a hundred contact sheets, shown beside one or two of their final, and known, pictures. Little snippets of words, of memories, or recollections from the photographer accompany each contact sheet exhibited.

Rene Burri contact sheet for Che Guevara

At first, for me, it slightly dispelled Bresson's philosophy of 'the decisive moment', as his contact sheet revealed him moving around his subjects, snapping, looking for the right angle, snapping, sidestepping, snapping, trying to find the right position from which to take the picture from, which were many in number upon that roll of film (it was the picture of children playing in Seville, in Spain (1933), with a boy on crutches in the foreground). But the more one looked at it, and at the many others in this exhibition, one started to have the feeling of something so intimate being revealed by the photographers who were shown. It illuminated, however subtly, the thought and instinct that took place in those decisive moments leading up to that single point in time when it all happened, when it suddenly snapped together in an instant in which the picture was taken. Once this perception replaced my initial one, it became a whole other experience in which to view it all from, where it suddenly opened up other layers and thoughts in reaction to these photographs, and there were so many good ones.

A good photograph can create a kind of harmony within the frame that we look into, and can, on rare occasion, steal  our breath from our exhaling lungs (harmony through form, composition, placing of people, subtext, history, meaning, metaphor, and everything else that goes with a good picture). And we know these pictures, many of them, for they have become immortalised, in a way, within the collective psyche, part of that canon of pictures that seem to resound no matter how old they are or in what country they were taken in. They can speak a sort of truth, of what it means to be human and alive and filled with hopes and fears, of horror, but of beauty, also, which can sing amidst the chaos of this earth in which we walk within. And so we search for these types of pictures, consciously or unconsciously, looking for the ones that can stop us dead, that can speak to us and say something about the human condition, of our place in this mad, mad world. It has been with us for around 32,000 years, that intrinsic need to make art, to communicate with the world outside of our selves, as was once done in the Chauvet Cave, in southern France, which contains some of the oldest images painted by humans.

And then, almost halfway through the exhibition, and bringing me, momentarily, out of my reverie and into a smile, were the words by Abbas, which were written onto the wall opposite a contact sheet of Margaret Thatcher (shot during the 1980 Conservative Party conference):

'A contact sheet reflects not only what the photographer sees and chooses to ... but also their moods, their hesitations, their failures. It is pitiless.'

EyeEm FINALIST

 

Out of 100,00 pictures submitted for the EyeEm photo competition, I was shortlised to the final 100, which was a pleasure to be a part of. Their full listing can be seen here.

 

INSIDE OUT: THE PEOPLE'S ART PROJECT

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'In 2011, French street artist JR announced his TED Prize winning wish to connect people worldwide through a collaborative artistic action. He launched INSIDE OUT, inspiring thousands of people — from South Dakota to Iran — to collectively transform their personal identities into public artwork. From Moscow to Tunisia, citizens have turned more than 120,000 digital portraits into bold posters covering everything from city walls to trains.'

​- TED

JR Insideout Project.jpg

THE AFRONAUTS

 
'The Afronauts', by Cristina De Middel.jpeg

The highlight for me at this year's Deutsche Borse Photography Prize was the project 'The Afronauts', from Cristina De Middel. It is based on the remarkable, and pretty unknown, story of the 1964 Zambia space program, which wanted to send the first African astronaut to the moon.

 

LEICA PORTRAIT: JOEL MEYEROWITZ

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An award-winning street photographer who has been creating memorable images in the great photojournalistic tradition since 1962, Joel Meyerowitz pioneered the use of color in this slice of life genre, and his classic book on Cape Cod, “Cape Light” was instrumental in changing the prevailing dismissive attitudes toward color photography. Within a few days of the 9/11 attacks on The World Trade Center, Meyerowitz began to create an archive of the destruction and recovery at Ground Zero that consists of over 8,000 images of the aftermath of the tragedy. In this latest Leica Portrait video, Joel shares the story of his transition from junior art director to legendary photographer. Read our interview with Joel on the Leica Camera blog: http://bit.ly/HOOADs Shot and Edited by Trevor Bayack Video Assistant Brian Butnick

Joel Meyerowitz, one of the great street photographers of the twentieth century, talks about his time watching the photographer Robert Frank taking pictures ("and it was all so physical, balletic and magical"), to his own time, shooting for over 50 years, with most of his work being shot in New York. He explains his views on photography as well as his need to get into Ground Zero, after 9/11, to document the wreckage of the Twin Towers being cleared, where he shot for nine months.

A FILM BY WILLIAM KLEIN

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An experimental meditation on Times Square marquees and iconic advertising, Klein's first film captures the concurrently seedy and dazzling aspects of New York's Great White Way. Illustrative of Klein's transition from photographer to filmmaker, Broadway by Light was declared by Orson Welles to be "the first film I've seen in which color was absolutely necessary.

A hypnotic, evocative film of Times Square, in 1958, as shot through the cinematic lens of the American photographer William Klein, titled 'Broadway by Light'.

TOM WAITS NARRATES THE LIFE OF JOHN BALDESSARI, IN 6 MINUTES

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Tom Waits narrates John Baldessari’s life, compressed into six minutes of film, which rushes through with a smile to the 'William Tell Overture', by Rossini.

The epic life of a world-class artist, jammed into six minutes. Narrated by Tom Waits. Commissioned by LACMA for their first annual "Art + Film Gala" honoring John Baldessari and Clint Eastwood.

directed by Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman (http://gosupermarche.com/) edited by Max Joseph (http://www.facebook.com/mjosephfilm) written by Gabe Nussbaum (http://www.bankstreetfilms.com) cinematography by Magdalena Gorka (http://magdalenagorka.com/) & Henry Joost produced by Mandy Yaeger & Erin Wright

Thank you to John Baldessari and his studio. (http://www.baldessari.org/)

"Look at the subject as if you have never seen it before. Examine it from every side. Draw its outline with your eyes or in the air with your hands, and saturate yourself with it."

-John Baldessari

TED: TARYN SIMON PHOTOGRAPHY TALK

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TED: "Taryn Simon captures the essence of vast, generation-spanning stories by photographing the descendants of people at the center of the narrative. In this riveting talk she shows a stream of these stories from all over the world, investigating the nature of genealogy and the way our lives are shaped by the interplay of many different forces.

With a large-format camera and a knack for talking her way into forbidden zones, Taryn Simon photographs portions of the American infrastructure inaccessible to its inhabitants."

"Archives exist because there's something that can't necessarily be articulated. Something is said in the gaps between all the information.”

Taryn Simon

GOD'S LAKE NARROWS: A FASCINATING INTERACTIVE PROJECT

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Here is a wonderful example of an interactive, photography and video project by the Canadian artist and filmmaker Kevin Lee Burton, titled 'God’s Lake Narrows'.

Here is what the New York Times wrote about it:

"The impetus for 'God’s Lake Narrows' — a personal, multilayered story produced by Canada’s publicly financed National Film Board — was the notion that few people aside from Mr. Lee Burton can envision a “classic northern town.”

It’s very much a question of access. “If you’re in New York,” Mr. Lee Burton, 32, says in the interactive, “you’d be 3,156 kilometers away from God’s Lake. All things considered I’m going to bet you’ve never visited.”

With virtually no economy, the reserve depends heavily upon the government for financial support. Because of the shortage of housing,  he and his family shifted from one home to the next, living with relatives. School stopped at the ninth grade. At 15, Mr. Lee Burton — who was born to a Cree mother and a white father — had no choice but to move south to attend public school.

“God’s Lake Narrows,” which was created and produced by Mr. Lee Burton and a sizable team, tries to break down the stereotypes often associated with native reserves."

THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF PAUL GRAHAM

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One of the photography shows I regret missing last year was that of Paul Graham and his 'mid-career retrospective' at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery, of which the following piece of writing, written by the gallery itself, is worth quoting for an insight into his work.

"Through renowned photographic series such as the A1, Troubled Land, New Europe or American Night British artist Paul Graham presents vivid portrayals of people and places. This comprehensive survey of over 25 years of work demonstrates his innovative approach to documentary, reinventing traditional genres of photography to create a unique visual language.

In the early 1980s Graham transposed the American genre of the road trip, exemplified by artists such as William Eggleston, to the less glamorous terrain of Britain’s A1 revealing its unexpectedly cinematic potential. He has gone on to use journeys – across Europe, Japan and America – to immerse himself in the landscapes and unconscious rituals of societies. The everyday scenarios he reflects are also embedded with a complex iconography. The hand that an immaculately made up Japanese girl waves across her mouth evokes a society anxiously over-invested in surfaces; under a hot grey Pittsburgh sky, an African American gardener mows the grass verge of a car-park, traversing back and forth, going nowhere.

Arrestingly beautiful, Graham’s photographs transform the banality of a social security office or a suburban lawn into compelling scenes. Yet for all the immediacy of his saturated colours and large formats, these pictures are also about what cannot be seen. ‘I realised that concealment… has run through… my work, from the landscape of Northern Ireland, and the unemployed tucked away in backstreet offices, to the burdens of history swept under the carpet in Europe or Japan. Concealment of our turmoil from others, from ourselves even’. This definitive show includes over 100 photographs as well as Graham’s book works and is accompanied by a comprehensive monograph."

Paul Graham from white tube on Vimeo.

 

Peter MacGill discusses the work of photographer Paul Graham.

 

Paul Graham has also written a couple of interesting pieces on his website, one of which I would like to share with you, below, which puts forth an interesting perspective on how a lot of photography is not championed by the art world due to a complexity that is not always easy to sum up in a single sentence..

 

'The Unreasonable Apple' Presentation at first MoMA Photography Forum, February 2010

This month I read a review in a leading US Art Magazine of a Jeff Wall survey book, praising how he had distinguished himself from previous art photography by:

 “Carefully constructing his pictures as provocative often open ended vignettes, instead of just snapping his surroundings”

Anyone who cares about photography‘s unique and astonishing qualities as a medium should be insulted by such remarks, especially here in 2010, in this country, in this city, which has embraced photography like no other.

Now this is maybe just an unthinking review, but what it does illustrate is how there remains a sizeable part of the art world that simply does not get photography. They get artists who use photography to illustrate their ideas, installations, performances and concepts, who 'deploy' the medium as one of a range of artistic strategies to complete their work.  But photography for and of itself - photographs taken from the world as it is - are misunderstood as a collection of random observations and lucky moments, or muddled up with photojournalism, or tarred with a semi-derogatory ‘documentary’ tag.  

This is tremendously sad, for if we look back, the simple truth is that the majority of the great photographic works of art in the 20th century operate in precisely this territory: from Walker Evans to Robert Frank, Diane Arbus to Garry Winogrand, from Stephen Shore travelling across America in Uncommon Places; Robert Adams navigating the freshly minted suburbs of Denver in The New West, or William Eggleston spiralling towards Jimmy Carter’s hometown in Election Eve, nobody would seriously propose that these sincere photographic artists were merely “snapping their surroundings”.

So what is the issue? The broader art world has no problems with the work of Jeff Wall, or Cindy Sherman or Thomas Demand partly because the creative process in the work is clear and plain to see, and it can be easily articulated what the artist did: Thomas Demand constructs his elaborate sculptural creations over many weeks before photographing them; Cindy Sherman develops, acts and performs in her self-portraits.  In each case the handiwork of the artist is readily apparent: something was synthesised, staged, constructed or performed.  The dealer can explain this to the client, the curator to the public, the art writer to their readers, etc.  The problem is that whilst you can discuss what Jeff Wall did in an elaborately staged street tableaux, how do you explain what Garry Winogrand did on a real New York street when he ‘just’ took the picture? Or for that matter what Stephen Shore created with his deadpan image of a crossroads in El Paso?  Anyone with an ounce of sensitivity knows they did something there, and something utterly remarkable at that, but... what?  How do we articulate this uniquely photographic creative act, and express what it amounts to in terms such that the art world, highly attuned to synthetic creation -the making of something by the artist- can appreciate serious photography that engages with the world as it is?

Now, please do not get me wrong, I admire the work of Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall and Thomas Demand - I have zero problems with it, and it is emphatically not an either/or situation.  Nor should you misunderstand me in the other direction: I am not arguing for some return to photographic fundamentalism of Magnum style Leica reportage 35mm black & white work or whatever - far from it, for we are clearly in a 'Post Documentary' photographic world now. Both of these disclaimers not withstanding, I have to say that the position of ‘straight’ photography in the art world reminds me of the parable of an isolated community who grew up eating potatoes all their life, and when presented with an apple, though it unreasonable and useless, because it didn’t taste like a potato.

Am I ‘Tilting at Windmills’ here?  Perhaps so, but as with the great Don – Cervantes that is – it is to make a point, earnestly, yet with good humour.  The point is certainly not the art world versus the photography world, because it is not apples or potatoes, anymore than it is sculpture or painting.  The point is that we need the smart, erudite and eloquent people in the art world, the clever curators and writers, those who do get it, to take the time to speak seriously about the nature of such photography, and articulate something of its dazzlingly unique qualities, to help the greater art world, and the public itself understand the nature of the creative act when you dance with life itself - when you form the meaningless world into photographs, then form those photographs into a meaningful world.  

Thankfully, as the glass clears, it has become apparent just what an incredible achievement Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand or Diane Arbus or Robert Adams accomplished back in the 50’s, 60’s or 70’s, and for that we must be grateful.  For the great exhibitions at the Met, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and of course MoMA itself; for the books, the catalogues, the enlightened essays: I thank you.  But... what of those who work today with equal commitment and sincerity, using straight photography in the cacophonous present?  I will not name names here, but for these serious photographers the fog of time still obfuscates their efforts, and the blindness j’accuse some of the art world of suffering from, narrows their options.  It means their work will almost never be considered for major exhibitions like Documenta, or placed alongside other artists in a Biennale, or found for sale in high level contemporary galleries and art fairs.  This does not just deprive the public of the work, and the work of its place, it denies these artists the self-confidence that enables them to grow, to feel appreciation and affirmation, not to mention some modest financial reward allowing them to continue to work.  It is also, most importantly, seeing the world of visual art in narrow terms. It is seeing the apple as unreasonable.

So, what is it we are discussing here - how do we describe the nature of this photographic creativity? My modest skills are insufficient for such things, but let me make an opening offer: perhaps we can agree that through force of vision these artists strive to pierce the opaque threshold of the now, to express something of the thus and so of life at the point they recognised it.  They struggle through photography to define these moments and bring them forward in time to us, to the here and now, so that with the clarity of hindsight, we may glimpse something of what it was they perceived.  Perhaps here we have stumbled upon a partial, but nonetheless astonishing description of the creative act at the heart of serious photography: nothing less than the measuring and folding of the cloth of time itself.