Friday, 26 July 2013
Modern building, 'ancient' photograph
An opportunity to experiment with old camera - an old 5x7 Seneca, made in Chicago around 1900 - and old glass plates, Ilford HP3 and Ilford R10 from the late 1950s, produced images that feel, in this weather, distinctly Mediterranean. Northampton College out of term time is lacking in crowds certainly. The glass plates are smaller than 5x7, so I had to stick them in the darkslide with masking tape on the back. The camera is challenging too - since its shutter can't be relied upon, I had to stop all the way down, open the lens with black card in front of it, and time the exposure as best I could. The lens stops down to f256, but this is an old American system - f256 is around f64. The plates came out perfectly - as if they were new. I am distinctly impressed with the survival rate of Ilford materials from around fifty years ago. The picture here is the HP3. The Ilford R10 is a slower and slightly less contrasty material with an ISO of 50. The packet reads: 'Soft Gradation Panchromatic'. The camera lens has no coating on it at all, and lends a slightly old fashioned look, despite the modern architecture.
Wednesday, 3 July 2013
Infrared film captures the English countryside
Of course I won't give up! The English countryside is beautiful, isn't it?
Thursday, 11 April 2013
Back to the old days?
Call me old fashioned! I tried some 1960s Ilford 'Chromatic' G.30 glass plates on 5x4, and amazingly the images came out. I have one MPP Darkslide that has an insert for film, which can be taken out to load a glass plate. I processed this in Kodak HC110-B for 10 minutes. The plates are in fact orthochromatic, and are desperately slow at 10iso, but it seems that unlike faster emulsions, the slow ones keep their speed. This is unfiltered, and really quite contrasty. I have not used any orthochromatic before, so perhaps this is a side effect. It does seem odd to have a 'modern' photograph taken on glass!
Tuesday, 7 August 2012
At last! A French vernacular bulding secured on Kodak HIE 5x4 film
It has taken a while to get this image. Holidaying in the Cher region of France, I have for years been driving past this lovely grain tower near St Just, south of Bourges on the D2076. At least I think it is a grain tower...But each time, either I didn't have a suitable camera, no infrared film, or the weather wasn't worth getting the camera out. But at long last, I had the camera - an ancient MPP Technical 5x4 camera - and I had the film, some truly rare Kodak HIE infrared in 5x4 size, I also had the R72 infrared filter, a Bolex tripod, and cable release. Getting into the field was a bit of a mission as it is right beside the rather busy trunk route between Bourges and Moulins. There is a tiny pull in, and I was able to gently trespass and secure this lovely view with nifty cloudscapes that create excellent infrared photography. I took four sheets of infrared, and two of Ektachrome. I processed the film in Kodak HC110 to 'B' ratio, and printed the images onto 20x24 Agfa Portriga grade 3, later selenium toning the fibre prints to increase contrast. OK so this is a bit geeky, but look at the picture! Actually of course this image was scanned from the negative, but you get the idea. I have a handful of sheets of 5x4 infrared left, but this is the first successful outing for this box of film, which expired in 1993. I keep it frozen until I need it.
Thursday, 26 January 2012
Don McCullin at The Imperial War Museum, London
Seems years ago since we posted the article on Don McCullin's retrospective show at IWM North, oh wait, it was years ago. Anyway we went to see the show now on at IWM in London. The show has great staging - huge enlargements of portraits bisect the gallery and the walls are crowded with original images and contemporary magazine spreads. The video interview is enlightening and the overall experience leaves the visitor in no doubt that they have had insight into the career of McCullin and maybe vicariously experienced a very small part of the trauma and pain of McCullin's subjects. We're not sure if we have any greater understanding of what drove McCullin to put himself in harms way so frequently - he was wounded a number of times, notably in Cambodia in 1970, and there does seem to be a sense of the gung ho and an exhilaration about some of the situations and images he made as a result. Our original post is still available under the 2010 section- see right.
Don McCullin’s Nikon F camera, damaged by a bullet at Prey Veng, Cambodia, 1970. Copyright Don McCullin
The show in London closes on the 15th of April and is highly recommended. A monograph / catalogue of McCullin's show Shaped by War is well worth buying and a copy is now in the College Library.
McCullin is also on show at Tate Britain and the link will take you to a videocast on the Tate site. This show is on until the 4th of March 2012.
The show in London closes on the 15th of April and is highly recommended. A monograph / catalogue of McCullin's show Shaped by War is well worth buying and a copy is now in the College Library.
McCullin is also on show at Tate Britain and the link will take you to a videocast on the Tate site. This show is on until the 4th of March 2012.
Monday, 11 July 2011
Thomas Struth at Whitechapel Gallery
A rainy Thursday in London well spent ... Charlie and I visited the Thomas Struth exhibition last week and must recommend the experience. The show covers more that 30 years of Struth's career and documents his change of style, themes and scale. It runs until the 16th of September and really should be on your to-do list over the summer.
Whitechapel Gallery, London E1.
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/thomas-struth-photographs-1978-2010
Take the tube to Aldgate East.
There was a very good review in the Guardian:
And also this interview:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/sep/18/thomas.struth?INTCMP=SRCH
Whitechapel Gallery, London E1.
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/thomas-struth-photographs-1978-2010
Take the tube to Aldgate East.
There was a very good review in the Guardian:
Thomas Struth: nameless energies
Deserted city streets, people gazing at famous paintings, dense jungle foliage and family portraits – the photographs of Thomas Struth explore memory and ways of looking. By Geoff Dyer
Semi Submersible Rig DSME Shipyard, Geoje Island (detail) (2007), by Thomas Struth. Photograph: Thomas Struth
Not to be confused with his near-contemporary Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth is one of that small band of artists – Francis Bacon and Canaletto are others – whose work seems to be an emanation of their names. A generalised expression of astonishment, "'Struth!" started out as an oath: "God's truth!" Certainly, there is an impersonal, almost omniscient quality to the truth conveyed by Struth's best photographs, among them a series devoted to "Places of Worship" in which the camera exults in its ability to capture what he calls "monumental emotional packages of overwhelming experience." This raises an obvious question: do these epic photographs deliver that which they capture? What is the nature of the aesthetic relationship – to frame the question more tightly – between a partial self-portrait of the photographer (identified only by the anonymous blur of his blue jacket) and the Christ-like self-portrait of Dürer he is contemplating in that modern, secular place of worship, the art gallery?
These questions, it needs emphasising, are ones posed not by a doubting critic but by Struth himself. The photograph – "the undeniable truth of what is in front of you" – is for him the product of "an intellectual process of understanding people or cities and their historical and phenomenological connections. At that point the photo is almost made, and all that remains is the mechanical process." The photographs, in these terms, are relics of the wholly cerebral process by which they came into existence. And yet some of them seem as mysterious as miracles.
Struth himself came into existence in the routine way, in Geldern, Germany, in 1954. He began studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1973, first with Gerhard Richter and then – at Richter's suggestion – with the newly appointed professor of photography, Bernd Becher. If Richter was interested in photography primarily as a goad to painting, Becher and his wife Hilla were devoted, with a glacial fixity of purpose, to the art of photography in its documentary essence – a commitment that could be traced back to August Sander and the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in the Weimar republic. Partly through the Bechers' own work – rigidly objective surveys of architectural forms – and later through the spreading reputations of their protégés (Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, Struth and Ruff) the Düsseldorf school became a kind of "international style" in the realm of photography. Its rise coincided with and was marked by a double inflation: in the scale of the works produced and the prices they fetched.
Modest in size, black-and-white, the works of Struth's early maturity – made in the late 1970s – display many of the features that will define the later, bigger and better-known colour works. The passage of time may also reveal them to be among his very best works, or at least the work in which his best qualities are found in most concentrated form. This is appropriate for these views of deserted streets – first in Düsseldorf, then New York, later in Rome, Edinburgh and beyond – came to be preoccupied by the attempt to document locations where the meaning of a given city was most "condensed or compacted". The tram lines and overhead cables stretching down the receding and empty streets emphasised Struth's preference for central perspective (which, as John Berger had explained earlier in the decade, causes the visible world to converge on the eye of the spectator "as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God").
Less grandly, there were echoes (especially in the picture of Campo Dei Fiori in Rome) of the Parisian street views of Atget who, under the expressed intention of providing "documents for artists", established a highly personalised style of detached inventory. Working in America in the 1930s, Walker Evans shared Atget's fondness for using the receding vista as a way of suggesting the view through "a stack of decades"; in Struth's case the views are often blocked by buildings of more recent or older provenance. And even when we are permitted to gaze, unimpeded, towards some kind of vanishing point, the scenes evoke not a vista of years but, as it were, a present of unusually extended duration. As a consequence there is no narrative potential in these pictures.
It's not just that the streets are deserted (ie that everyone's indoors, tucked up in bed); the buildings look uninhabited too. There is no sense – in spite of all the windows – that there might be someone looking out, that our gaze is in any way reciprocated. In mood these photographs are reminiscent of the opening scenes of Night Work by the Austrian novelist Thomas Glavinic in which a man in Vienna, Jonas, wakes up to discover that he is the last person on earth:
He kept an eye open for signs of life, or at least for some indication of what might have happened here, but all he saw were abandoned cars neatly parked . . . He looked in all directions. Stood still and listened. Walked the few metres back to the intersection and peered down the adjoining streets. Parked cars, nothing else . . . He noticed nothing out of the ordinary.
Jonas's wanderings – his investigation of this strange extinction of narrative – force him to conclude that "some catastrophe was to blame". The nature of that catastrophe is not made clear but in some of Struth's pictures there is the pervasive if never explicit suggestion of the Third Reich and the second world war. For someone of Struth's generation, as he has said, this confrontation "with Germany's past" was unavoidable. Whether photographing streets or making the "Family Portraits" (another important series), "the question of what your family did under fascism was never far away . . . The traces of structures, social and psychological, are legible." The empty cityscapes seem devoid of memory – while all the time suggesting that this lack might itself be a memory. (This sense has deepened over the years as the photographs have become subtly ingrained with our memories: of other times when we have seen them, in books and earlier exhibitions.) Inverting the claim of Dresden-born Durs Grünbein that "Memory has no real estate" (in his poem "Europe After the Rains"), Struth asks if this is what the world would look like if memory were purely physical, tangible, if it resided not in people's heads but only in structures, in the buildings and streets they had created.
The legacy of nazism is specific to the German pictures but versions of his mission question – "Why do cities look the way they do?" – are asked in New York and elsewhere. Needless to say, they are never answered – that would provide a narrative. Instead there is the conviction that the photographer, in the words of art critic Peter Schjeldahl, "had a Geiger counter for meaning, whose meter happened to go crazy at this location".
We are touching here on what Walter Benjamin called "the optical unconscious" (not the collective unconscious as the authors of an essay in the catalogue accompanying the upcoming Whitechapel show mistakenly claim). Another of Benjamin's ideas informs – and is tested by – the many photographs Struth made of people looking at paintings in museums (and, in a few instances, of the way these people might appear to the paintings they are looking at). The reciprocal choreography whereby viewers accidentally echo poses depicted in the paintings was a rich source of visual quips for the Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt, but for Struth this was just the starting point. What interested him was the chance to bring together "the time of the picture and the time of the viewer". And not only that. In Benjamin's famous formulation the aura of the work of art was lost by frequent reproduction (as the aura of his idea has itself been bleached out by incessant re-quotation). With this in mind Benjamin's account can usefully be balanced by another famous passage, from Don DeLillo's White Noise, where the narrator, Jack, and his friend Murray visit the "Most Photographed Barn in America". "We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one," Murray explains. "Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."
What kind of accumulation and convergence occurs when we come face to face with the most frequently reproduced items in a museum? This is the question Struth asks of Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa – and of the people who make the daily pilgrimage to see it. The most spectacular work in the series is probably the super-size photograph of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, taken while it was on loan to the National Museum of Art in Tokyo. The painting is hung behind bullet-proof glass, making it look like a cinema screen on which an epic costume drama is being projected, watched by an audience of silhouetted Japanese who, exactly as prescribed by DeLillo, are "part of the aura".
Taking advantage of the new-found ability to make photographs on the scale of history paintings, Struth made visible the compound phenomenon that might be termed the aura of nameless energies. The project reached a logical apotheosis in 2007 when photographs from the series were exhibited in the Prado, some in proximity to the paintings depicted in them, like magnets with their silent powers of mutual attraction and negation simultaneously heightened and held in check. At the Whitechapel someone, surely, will photograph people gazing at these famous photographs of people gazing at the famous paintings.
Along with the various overlapping museum series Struth continued to photograph the world's cities, in colour predominantly and – especially in China and Japan – with people now permitted walk and cycle-on parts in the kind of scenes from which they had been conspicuously absent in the west. He also undertook expeditions to photograph forests and jungles where the tropical foliage was often so dense and lush as to resist the scrutiny the images compelled. They were powerful, these "New Pictures from Paradise", but perhaps they also signalled a lurking danger: how fertility and abundance can become self-obstructing, how the over-grown might turn into the over-blown.
It is difficult not to see some of the recent work – tangles of flex and wire, the manufactured equivalent of all that perspective-less, Pollock-esque vegetation – as evidence of a lack of direction or purpose. Make no mistake, Struth's best works earn their size, but the big recent pictures of very big things such as the construction of the Space Shuttle at Cape Canaveral – bigger than a snooker table: how's that for size – emphasise the scale of the emptiness and raise further doubts about where he might be headed. The accomplishments are undeniable but, on the eve of this retrospective, one is reminded (by Nietzsche) of "god's boredom on the seventh day of creation".
These questions, it needs emphasising, are ones posed not by a doubting critic but by Struth himself. The photograph – "the undeniable truth of what is in front of you" – is for him the product of "an intellectual process of understanding people or cities and their historical and phenomenological connections. At that point the photo is almost made, and all that remains is the mechanical process." The photographs, in these terms, are relics of the wholly cerebral process by which they came into existence. And yet some of them seem as mysterious as miracles.
Struth himself came into existence in the routine way, in Geldern, Germany, in 1954. He began studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1973, first with Gerhard Richter and then – at Richter's suggestion – with the newly appointed professor of photography, Bernd Becher. If Richter was interested in photography primarily as a goad to painting, Becher and his wife Hilla were devoted, with a glacial fixity of purpose, to the art of photography in its documentary essence – a commitment that could be traced back to August Sander and the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in the Weimar republic. Partly through the Bechers' own work – rigidly objective surveys of architectural forms – and later through the spreading reputations of their protégés (Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, Struth and Ruff) the Düsseldorf school became a kind of "international style" in the realm of photography. Its rise coincided with and was marked by a double inflation: in the scale of the works produced and the prices they fetched.
Modest in size, black-and-white, the works of Struth's early maturity – made in the late 1970s – display many of the features that will define the later, bigger and better-known colour works. The passage of time may also reveal them to be among his very best works, or at least the work in which his best qualities are found in most concentrated form. This is appropriate for these views of deserted streets – first in Düsseldorf, then New York, later in Rome, Edinburgh and beyond – came to be preoccupied by the attempt to document locations where the meaning of a given city was most "condensed or compacted". The tram lines and overhead cables stretching down the receding and empty streets emphasised Struth's preference for central perspective (which, as John Berger had explained earlier in the decade, causes the visible world to converge on the eye of the spectator "as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God").
Less grandly, there were echoes (especially in the picture of Campo Dei Fiori in Rome) of the Parisian street views of Atget who, under the expressed intention of providing "documents for artists", established a highly personalised style of detached inventory. Working in America in the 1930s, Walker Evans shared Atget's fondness for using the receding vista as a way of suggesting the view through "a stack of decades"; in Struth's case the views are often blocked by buildings of more recent or older provenance. And even when we are permitted to gaze, unimpeded, towards some kind of vanishing point, the scenes evoke not a vista of years but, as it were, a present of unusually extended duration. As a consequence there is no narrative potential in these pictures.
It's not just that the streets are deserted (ie that everyone's indoors, tucked up in bed); the buildings look uninhabited too. There is no sense – in spite of all the windows – that there might be someone looking out, that our gaze is in any way reciprocated. In mood these photographs are reminiscent of the opening scenes of Night Work by the Austrian novelist Thomas Glavinic in which a man in Vienna, Jonas, wakes up to discover that he is the last person on earth:
He kept an eye open for signs of life, or at least for some indication of what might have happened here, but all he saw were abandoned cars neatly parked . . . He looked in all directions. Stood still and listened. Walked the few metres back to the intersection and peered down the adjoining streets. Parked cars, nothing else . . . He noticed nothing out of the ordinary.
Jonas's wanderings – his investigation of this strange extinction of narrative – force him to conclude that "some catastrophe was to blame". The nature of that catastrophe is not made clear but in some of Struth's pictures there is the pervasive if never explicit suggestion of the Third Reich and the second world war. For someone of Struth's generation, as he has said, this confrontation "with Germany's past" was unavoidable. Whether photographing streets or making the "Family Portraits" (another important series), "the question of what your family did under fascism was never far away . . . The traces of structures, social and psychological, are legible." The empty cityscapes seem devoid of memory – while all the time suggesting that this lack might itself be a memory. (This sense has deepened over the years as the photographs have become subtly ingrained with our memories: of other times when we have seen them, in books and earlier exhibitions.) Inverting the claim of Dresden-born Durs Grünbein that "Memory has no real estate" (in his poem "Europe After the Rains"), Struth asks if this is what the world would look like if memory were purely physical, tangible, if it resided not in people's heads but only in structures, in the buildings and streets they had created.
The legacy of nazism is specific to the German pictures but versions of his mission question – "Why do cities look the way they do?" – are asked in New York and elsewhere. Needless to say, they are never answered – that would provide a narrative. Instead there is the conviction that the photographer, in the words of art critic Peter Schjeldahl, "had a Geiger counter for meaning, whose meter happened to go crazy at this location".
We are touching here on what Walter Benjamin called "the optical unconscious" (not the collective unconscious as the authors of an essay in the catalogue accompanying the upcoming Whitechapel show mistakenly claim). Another of Benjamin's ideas informs – and is tested by – the many photographs Struth made of people looking at paintings in museums (and, in a few instances, of the way these people might appear to the paintings they are looking at). The reciprocal choreography whereby viewers accidentally echo poses depicted in the paintings was a rich source of visual quips for the Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt, but for Struth this was just the starting point. What interested him was the chance to bring together "the time of the picture and the time of the viewer". And not only that. In Benjamin's famous formulation the aura of the work of art was lost by frequent reproduction (as the aura of his idea has itself been bleached out by incessant re-quotation). With this in mind Benjamin's account can usefully be balanced by another famous passage, from Don DeLillo's White Noise, where the narrator, Jack, and his friend Murray visit the "Most Photographed Barn in America". "We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one," Murray explains. "Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."
What kind of accumulation and convergence occurs when we come face to face with the most frequently reproduced items in a museum? This is the question Struth asks of Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa – and of the people who make the daily pilgrimage to see it. The most spectacular work in the series is probably the super-size photograph of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, taken while it was on loan to the National Museum of Art in Tokyo. The painting is hung behind bullet-proof glass, making it look like a cinema screen on which an epic costume drama is being projected, watched by an audience of silhouetted Japanese who, exactly as prescribed by DeLillo, are "part of the aura".
Taking advantage of the new-found ability to make photographs on the scale of history paintings, Struth made visible the compound phenomenon that might be termed the aura of nameless energies. The project reached a logical apotheosis in 2007 when photographs from the series were exhibited in the Prado, some in proximity to the paintings depicted in them, like magnets with their silent powers of mutual attraction and negation simultaneously heightened and held in check. At the Whitechapel someone, surely, will photograph people gazing at these famous photographs of people gazing at the famous paintings.
Along with the various overlapping museum series Struth continued to photograph the world's cities, in colour predominantly and – especially in China and Japan – with people now permitted walk and cycle-on parts in the kind of scenes from which they had been conspicuously absent in the west. He also undertook expeditions to photograph forests and jungles where the tropical foliage was often so dense and lush as to resist the scrutiny the images compelled. They were powerful, these "New Pictures from Paradise", but perhaps they also signalled a lurking danger: how fertility and abundance can become self-obstructing, how the over-grown might turn into the over-blown.
It is difficult not to see some of the recent work – tangles of flex and wire, the manufactured equivalent of all that perspective-less, Pollock-esque vegetation – as evidence of a lack of direction or purpose. Make no mistake, Struth's best works earn their size, but the big recent pictures of very big things such as the construction of the Space Shuttle at Cape Canaveral – bigger than a snooker table: how's that for size – emphasise the scale of the emptiness and raise further doubts about where he might be headed. The accomplishments are undeniable but, on the eve of this retrospective, one is reminded (by Nietzsche) of "god's boredom on the seventh day of creation".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/sep/18/thomas.struth?INTCMP=SRCH
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Tribute to Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros
Taken from the Host Gallery / Foto8 website
The News We Dont Want to Report
| News - foto8 news | ||
| Written by Jon Levy | ||
| 20 Apr 2011 | ||
Today we have received the terrible news of the deaths of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, two exemplary photojournalists. They both selflessly dedicated themselves to telling the world about the war in Libya that has destroyed and continues to threaten so many others. Photographers Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown were also in the group that came under fire covering the fighting in Misrata, Libya. Guy and Michael are expected to survive the injuries they received from the rocket attack. We wish for their swift and safe return.  Photo courtesy of Mark Windsor, Guernsey 2010 Tim has been a personal friend for many years and a generous and much loved collaborator, close to all who knew him and worked on projects with him at Foto8. We are beyond words at this time to express our grief or to fully comprehend the torment that Tim's and Chris' families are enduring. The news is horrendous and the loss of our friends, irreplaceable to all at Foto8 and who knew them. Our thoughts and prayers are with those who continue to fight for life, and for those who mourn these lives - taken too young and with so much to offer.
Download MP3 version An email from Tim last month after the Oscars, to a fellow filmmaker who was upset at his not winning: "Well, we didn't get to take home the little gold man, but going down the red carpet with those soldiers was one of the highlights of my life so far, and a real finale to an incredible journey... And while this particular journey may be over, the film lives on! Tim" You're always a winner to us Tim xxx |
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