Today I went to go and see the new Gregory Crewdson Cathedral of Pines at The Photographers Gallery exhibition. 

The first thing that struck me was the lighting, the lighting was a masterclass, I spent ages on each image to see how it was lit. 

Secondly the size of the prints were very consistent but also roughly the size of a picture window. Once I listened to the behind the scenes interview this is something Crewdson confirmed as well. They are of the size that feels like you are looking through a window into another world, into Becket Massachusetts where this series was shot.

There is a posing style that Crewdson use, and it's so distinct that as soon as you see an image you know it's one of his. I think it will be a very difficult pose to get, it needs to be lifeless, no performance, as still as the model can be.

The scale of the surroundings really makes these images. Crewdson would often shoot fairly wide to show off the sheer scale of the pines. 

There is an overall sense of waiting for something to happen. In each of the images there are people waiting around. 

In this series Crewdson uses mirrors frequently giving the viewer extra information of what is going on in the room, away from the view of the camera. 

At first glance the images feel like large scale historic landscape paintings but with people in them.

My takeout of the day was that these are super simple, humble, normal households and Crewdson with the help of a large team, has changed those spaces into something totally different. Where before it was an old run down barn it was now a space with someone in it, telling a story and leaving the viewer with as many questions as answers.

Crewdson states in an interview that he sees himself as a story teller but he is very aware that unlike film (which his images looks like they've been lifted from) does not have a beginning or an ending. He can only tell the story with that one frame and there is a remarkable amount of story in each of the frames.

Overall a very enjoyable exhibition and one I would highly recommend. 

References: The Photographers Gallery: Aug17

1. The proof that documentary photography is not a fad or a vogue lies in the history of other movements in photography. 

2. It is life that is exciting and important, and life whole and unretouched.

3. A Farm Security Administration photograph of an old woman's knotted and gnarled hands is a human and social document of great        moment and moving quality.

4. By the imagination and intelligence he possesses and uses, the photographer controls the new esthetic, finds the significant truth and gives it significant form.

5. The opportunities for publishing honest photographs of present-day life in magazines or newspapers are not many.

6. At the turn of the century art got mixed with photography.

7. We may say at once that photography is not art in the old sense. It is not a romantic, impressionistic medium, dependent on subjective factors and ignoring the objective. It is bound to realism in as complex a way as buildings are bound to the earth by the pull of gravitation.

8. A work of art, on this basis, must have meaning, it must have content, it must communicate, it must speak to an audience.

9. For communication, the photograph has qualities equaled by no other pictorial medium. If one wishes to present the interior of a slum dwelling where eight people live in one room, the camera will reveal the riddled floors, the dirty bedding, the dishes stacked unwashed on a table, the thousand and one details that total up to squalor and human degradation. To paint each item completely would take a dozen Hoochs and Chardins many months. Here with the instantaneous blink of the camera eye, we have reality captured, set down for as long as negative and print will endure.

10. photography. For the greatest objective of such work is to widen the world we live in, to acquaint us with the range and variety of human existence, to inform us (as it were forcibly) of unnecessary social horrors such as war, to make us aware of the civilization in which we live and hope to function as creative workers.

McCausland highlights some of the same issues that documentary photographers struggles with to this day. How much of the photographers personality are to be included in their work, but at the same time how much does that influence the work that they produce. If they add too much they remove information from the situation, if they don't add any they they are not telling a story. I think that this article with a couple of changes could have been written in the modern age and people would not questions what McCausland says, its still as true today as it was then. She touches on a couple of ethical and moral points that asks the photographer how honest a photo is, or does the camera always lie thanks to the photographer and their decisions?

On the 21st of May I went to the Saatchi Gallery to see the new Selfie to Self Expression exhibition.

Whether you love them or loathe them selfies are now so much a part of culture that it is hard to get away from. And lets be honnest we have all taken one at some stage. Be it with a friend, in a location or with a celebrity it does not matter. But is it something new? No its not think back, did your parents ever ask someone to take a pic of you in front of wherever you were visiting? Probably, the thing with selfies are that you do not need to bother others you just take it yourself. At first I thought the gallery would be filled with duck faced pouting selfie takers but luckily its not that at all. There is a great range of people taking self portraits and how that it has become something of the norm in society. Here are a couple of the pieces that stood out for me.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/richard-long-1525

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/performing-for-the-camera-5-key-artists

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/dennis-oppenheim-1722

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/cindy-sherman-1938

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/john-hilliard-1287

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/adam-broomberg-16107

D&AD had hosted their festival in the Truman brewery 25-27th of April in east London. 

As part of it they had a private view of the next photographer award. 21 young photographers each exhibiting between 4 and 6 images.

Nestled in the heart of the D&AD festival I am sure it is a great for anyone to make it onto the roster of photographers. Before going I thought it might be a lot of fashion or hard to reach photographic styles but in essence most of it were documentary photography.

Here are the images and the photographers that caught my eye.

Laetitia Vancon: At the end of the day

I really liked this image. What caught my eye was the fact that she was well dressed but everything around her seem to be falling apart, the house in not quite square, the grass is a bit dead, even her friends are not looking in the same direction as she is. Then I read her story and the image had even more meaning. 

This is the writeup. "Melanie MacDonald, 22 years old, just finished her study as Bsc Adult Nursing Degree in the Western Isles Hospital in Stornoway. Places are rare in the hospital, but she will not go, she will find something else to do until the opportunity to be recruited as a nurse becomes possible."

This image is one I have seen in person multiple times, two friends sitting and having a chat, I often look at situations like this making up back stories for each unknown person. But here it is spelled out for us. I liked the fact that they both look a little bit like the illustrations on the wall. 

This is the writeup. "Niall and Callum, 24 years old, are best friends. Niall works as a diver on a boat in charge of the maintenance of coastal facilities. Callum is at the reception of the unique sociocultural center of the Isle of Lewis, before landing there he tried a singing career in Glasgow but it did not work out, so he came back half-hearted."

Aleksey Kondratyev: Ice Fisher

I loved seeing these images, they just made me smile to start with and  the more I looked at the more I found, I remember listening to my Dad returning from Sweden in the 80s and telling us about ice fishing. Crazy people sitting in the middle of nowhere fishing through a small hole cut into the ice. 

Artur Golacki: Talking Trees

Elzbieta Kurowska: Light Forms

I loved the technical thinking that went into this type of photography. 

Johnny Miller : Unequal Scenes

Being South African too I spotted the informal housing (as its called by the government) for what they were before even reading the description. 

Reference:

https://www.dandad.org/en/d-ad-next-photographer-award - Accessed 25 April 20127

I had a morning off work and decided to go and visit the Photographers gallery just off Oxford Circus. 

There were two very different exhititions on. 

On the first floor: Made you look: Dandyism and black masculinity

A selection of both street and studio portraiture, brings together a group of geographically diverse photographers who all explores black masculinity as performance, and personal politics.

Curated by Ekow Eshun the exhibition brings photographers like. Liz Johnson Artur, Larry Dunstan, Samuel Fosso, Hassan Hajjaj, Colin Jones, Isaac Julien, Kristin-Lee Moolman, Jeffery Henson Scales and Malick Sidbé together. 

An interview with Ekow Eshun explaining the images behind the exhibit.

Overall it is a very bright and extroverted exhibition. Walking around the gallery it was interesting to see so many photographers taking images of something so similar. Ranging from a the past to modern day.

On floor 4&5 was 

Terence Donovan: Speed of Light

A restrospective of legendary photographer Terence Donovan (1936-1996)

A great selection of images by Donovan, showing his range and just the volume of images that he took.

Here is Robin Muir curator of the exhibition explaining a bit more about the exhibition.

The highlight for me was seeing Donovan's notebooks, he meticulously noted down every setup for every scene. Where the lights were, where the camera, the hight of the camera, the speed of the film, the focal length and then some information about what could go wrong. I just loved the detail in the craft but also the cleverness of it, next time you do a shoot that you want a similar look to you don't have to go from memory you have detailed notes on exactly how it was achieved.

The Thermodynamic fashion shoot image for About Town magazine was one of my favourite images of the exhibition.

What I learned: I did not realise that Donovan and Bailey had such similar styles, or was it the style of the time? On some of the images If you said they were Bailey I would not have questioned it. But I guess its the 70s and early 80s black and white images on a white background. 

I have read Simon Brainbridges article a couple of times and I have seen the Robbie Cooper Immersion work when it just came out. So I was drawn to it as I never really researched it other than watching the video of the kids playing computer games.

Watching the piece again I just love the concept, you can pause on just about any frame and have a print. The range of emotions or the lack thereof is so contrasting and the audio of the gameplay ads to feeling of each portrait. Would it work as well as an exhibition of still portraits without the video showing the viewer where the still frames came from? I don't think it would, it would be a set of nice portraits but the feeling you get from each of these are from the story gained from watching the video.

In a time where moving portraits have become something that a lot of photographers take this is a study not only of how we react to media but also a reflection of popular culture. This is how people react to the media that they consume (usually behind closed doors).

Has technology enabled this type of project to be made? Yes its shot on a Red Epic which allows a still frame to be taken from any frame due to the sensor size. On the negative is this like fishing with a hand grenade? Where you get capture 25 images every second. With this approach does it kill the "decisive moment" that Cartier-bresson was so well known for? Does it remove the skill of the photographer, where the photographer no longer needs to take the image once they are happy with the frame but rather captures everything. Is this different from modern digital photographers? Yes and no. Yes it is different as you now have 90,000 frames for every hour where modern digtial photographers will have taken anything upwards of 1600 images per day. Compare that to a thirty years ago where ten rolls of film was the norm. 

I like the idea and I like the images but the more I look at it the more I question if it is a photography project or a video supported by stills to fill space in galleries?

Jon Levy - Founder Foto8 talking about documentary in the art gallery.

The points I take out of the interview with Levy are

I agree with him that documentary is a form of story telling. 

There is ambiguity between journalism and art. Each person viewing a project will have an oppinion on whether it is art or photojournalism. 

In the end every story be it art or photo journalism it comes back to the premise of story telling and it's even the criteria for editorial decisions that photo8 makes too.

I agree with Jon, photojournalism or documentary as we know it today is a Westen view of the rest of the world. But with technology it levels the playing field allowing photographers from all over the world to participate in the same forum.

Lastly Jon makes a point about point of view. I think its essential to bring a point of view to a project, but to have that point of view from the start and not in hind sight once the images are printed. The point of view is almost the driving force behind projects.

http://www.martharosler.net/about/index.html In, around and afterthoughts (on documentary photography) - Martha Rosler

Firstly I find Rosler's style of writing hard work, she is one of those writers who sometime uses words that over complicates the sentence for no reason, it also jumps from topic to topic without warning. But with my rant over. This is what I take out of the article. 

I feel that Rosler's point of view on documentary photography is quite negative, in each of the examples she gives it is from a negative point of view. So overall I feel that her point of view is that documentary photography is not objective and she does not feel that its got merit as a social cause. 

The article starts with referencing the Bowery in New York, which is an archetypal skid row. Photographers have flocked to the Bowery to take photos of the misery within its boundaries. To show those who has more what they should be grateful for. It has also been used to raise funds or awareness of such areas. 

Early photography felt like it had more clout when it came to showing despair. Jacob Riis wrote "the sights I saw there gripped my heart until I felt that I must tell of them, or burst." "I wrote, but it seemed to make no impression." With minimal retouching and being a new medium it feels like photographers had the opportunity to make a difference to show "polite society" what they had to be grateful but at the same time play to their "sympathy for the poor". "Yet the force of documentary surely derives in part from that the images might be more decisively unsettling than the arguments enveloping them." I feel that this does not apply to modern day documentary photography. Long gone are the days where images of starving children jolts us out of our seats and into action, even if that action is giving £3 a month for fresh water. It is so crowded with these types of images that we almost don't notice them.

"Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat in fantasy, into imagery" 

A lot of early liberal documentary photography was based around the notion of "these people can do nothing for themselves" so feel sorry for them rather than, take action like Cesar Chavez, who organised farm workers to fight for themselves. 

One of the other points that Rosler raises is that of the bravery of the photographer. As viewers we see these images and we see the "bravery or the manipulativeness and savvy of the photographer who entered a situation of physical, social restrictedness, human decay, or combinations of these and saved us the trouble" This is true for every war image ever seen, I don't want to be there fighting let alone running around with only a camera to defend myself to bring me these images.

But on a good note I thought that the example raised by Rosler of W.Eugene Smith and Aileen Miko Smith who photographed the human devistation in Minamata (a small Japanese fishing village ravaged thanks to Chisso chemical firm dumping mercury-laden wast into the waters) was a good reason to tell the rest of the world, not for profit of the photographers but for the awareness that this chemical company caused this amount of harm to the people around it, and it could have been avoided. Other communities around the world stood up and ensured that their towns did not turn into Minamata.  If photography has this effect it has to be positive even though the subject it not.

Edward S Curtis was the opposite of the Smith family, he changed the perception people had of Native North American people by arriving with a modern day props and wardrobe department. Not only did he dress his sitters he also retouched his images for his discerning buyers. He made documentary that would sell for the highest price not documentary about something real. "The higher the price that the photography can command as a commodity in dealerships, the higher the status accorded to it in museums and galleries, the greater will be the gap between that kind of documentary and another kind, a documentary incorporated into an explicit analysis of society and at least the beginning of a program for changing it" 

and I agree wholeheartedly with the statement

"The liberal documentary, in which members of the ascendant classes are implored to have pity on and to rescue members of the oppressed, now belongs to the past"

Advertising is known for bending the truth and when it comes to photography it is littered with copies and remakes and lazy creative ideas. Its much easier to take an existing well known image and apply a brand to it than it is to create something original. Advertisers will usually take the easy option, pick something that is already known so we don't have to spend the money to get it known. This is the same for the Visa advert 1979. Elliot Erwitt created an image in the 1950s for the French office of tourism. It was then recreated (almost to the T) by a producer for the 1979 commercial.

Personally I have a problem with taking photos of the down and out, the drunks, the homeless. I find taking images of people who have nothing, degrading to that person. As a photographer what are you gaining or changing in society when you take an image of a homeless person? The simple answer is that its much easier to walk up to someone who lives on the street and take a photo of them than it is to take one of someone who you feel is superior to you, in either class or financial standing. I very often see photographers trade on their portrait ability with black and white images of scruffy men with big beards, over processed images with added sharpness and added grain to show every blemish and every imperfection. These images are meant to show how good a photographer is but in essence it shows everything but what I would want to see from a portrait photographer. As an example Lee Jeffries did a series on the homeless. I like some if the images but for some reason I have no empathy for the people in the images. I just feel that he is building his reputation and further earning potential on someone who will never see a dime of that money. Just like Florence Thompson who never saw a dime after becoming the face of "the worlds most reproduced photograph" Dorothea Lange profited from that image and built a reputation on it whereas Thompson was never rewarded.

In hindsight even though Rosler's article was hard to read I feel very strongly about some of the topics she raised and it has made me think more than I first thought it would. 

References

‘In, Around and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography)’ by Martha Rosler in Bolton, R. (ed.) (1992) The Contest of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (p.303). 

The myth of objectivity

When I read Bazin’s statement it reads like someone who has fallen in love. It’s optimistic, it looks past all the flaws and faults and finds the positive. The main positive, the positive that existed in 1945 more so than today. If we look at the number of images Bazin took in 1945 versus the 35 images per second that digital cameras can take today it was more considered the photographers had to take their time to compose the image and take it, they could not move the camera around the scene as easily as we can today. So there may have been a sense that what photographers took were more real than the images today, each image had to be though through.

But at the same time what Bazin does not mention is the ability to frame a subject and its surroundings and by doing so change the context of the image. An image of a single woman standing in a doorway has a very different meaning to the same woman standing in the same doorway with two children in tattered clothing around her. So by the simple act of capturing a moment in time even down to the moment that photographer presses the button (are they blinking, are they looking down are their hair a mess) is an act of selection and curation. In modern day photography we can shoot a multitude of frames and pick the best but it is no different to the two or three images that photographers had at the time of Bazin, the selection process of what to capture in the frame remains the same.