These are exciting times for contemporary photography, with vast amounts of new work to be seen, vast numbers of books published, vast numbers of young photographers emerging. Looking back over the past few years, one thing appears to be unchanged, though: Only every so often, one encounters photography that has the ability to stop one in its tracks, that makes everything else disappear for a moment. Those moments are to be cherished, especially since they’re so rare, so unpredictable.
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Television famously has been described as a self-referential medium, but it appears that it might be time to move beyond that. TV has now come to create its own actual reality, in what one could call an evolutionary step. And unlike in the case of the American ultra-conservatives’ version of such a newly (“faith based”) reality, this one is truly going to stay with us: the “faith based” reality only exists if you believe in it or, probably more accurately, if you want to believe in it; TV’s new reality exists even if you don’t want to believe it’s true. In this sense, what is called “reality TV” is not some form of TV any longer, it is a symbiosis of reality and TV, and it is not going away if we switch off the TV set.
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The fall of Communism, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and subsequent economic “shock therapies” have resulted in drastic changes all over Eastern Europe, with some countries being hit harder than others. For example, the male life expectancy in Russia has dropped to less than 59 years. Another example is the meteoric rise of the number of people who are either HIV positive or have full-blown AIDS in the Ukraine.
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The year 1968 might be considered the time when the Sixties ended prematurely. Soviet boots had crushed what people in Prague called “socialism with a human face”, students revolting in France and Germany had achieved… well… what? And by the end of 1968, two American public figures who had inspired millions of people with their visions, Dr. Martin Luther King jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, were dead, both assassinated. Richard Nixon was elected president, promising law and order and peace in Southeast Asia (instead, the American people got a man who put himself above the law and who secretly expanded the Vietnam war into Cambodia).
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At the beginning of the 21st Century, photojournalism finds itself in a somewhat uncomfortable position. On the one had, it has become an established and widely accepted form of journalism. On the other hand, its main language - grainy, crooked, and/or partially blurry images, often still black and white - has lost most of its impact because of the fact that it has become so ubiquitous. Of course, I am somewhat exaggerating, but while some of the most egregious facts of life on this planet have not changed at all over the past thirty, forty, fifty years (take, for example, widespread poverty and starvation, combined with political corruption, in large parts of Africa), we, as the viewers of photojournalism, simply are not quite as affected any longer, simply because we are so familiar with the imagery. Just the other day, I read a comment where someone talked about the work of an American photojournalist who had covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the complaint being that the photographer had failed to deliver “something new”. Just covering the wars, it seems, is not good enough. Just showing what war does - what our war does - is not good enough, we have to see something new. This is because I do not envy photojournalists, especially since I know, from having talked to some of them, that they often are very engaged and very interested in making the world look at the injustice and/or violence they are trying to cover.
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Signs is Peter Granser’s third book about a part of the US (after Sun City and Coney Island), this time focusing on Texas. According to the publisher’s description, Signs “draws a telling picture of life today in America. For it, Granser traveled 12,000 miles through the ‘republic’ of Texas. With keen and objective precision, he focuses in his color photographs on the plethora of relics and signs that proliferate across the landscape and provide us with insights into the strange and contradictory state of contemporary American identity.”
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Edgar Martins’ Topologies is a product of Aperture Foundation’s “First Book Initiative”, which aims at publishing “new work by emerging artists”, and it contains what one might call photographs of landscapes. I do not know what it is that often makes artists somewhat reluctant to call such photographs what they are: landscapes. I do suspect that using the word “landscape” might maybe pre-set the viewer’s mind to something not desired. But then what effect does “topologies” achieve? After “typologies”, we now got “topologies”?
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Popular folklore has it that German photographers have had a dominating influence on the aesthetics of contemporary photography. In this context, “German photographers” means people from Düsseldorf, with their “cool”, “detached” style and their “typologies”. Needless to say, this image is a mere caricature, and a pretty shoddily drawn one at that. In reality, German photography has become a very important part of contemporary photography, but while the Düsseldorf Art Academie has spawned quite a few well-known practitioners, there are many others whose work doesn’t conform at all to the “cool” and “unpersonal” style that is supposed to be what makes the “German” in “German photography”. To wit: Wolfgang Tillmans.
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In spite of a “hot” photography book market, books giving an overview of contemporary photography are still fairly rare. Photo Art, edited by Uta Grosenick and Thomas Seelig and published by Aperture, is the latest and most welcome attempt to fill in the gap. Listing a whooping 112 artists, according to the editors the book is “a comprehensive survey of photography in the early 21st century”.
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At the beginning of the 21st Century, it seems that the only way to discover landscapes never seen before is to send robots and satellites to other planets or their moons. Those landscapes then amaze us, and I often wonder why that is. Have we really seen everything there is to see about our home planet? Is it the often somewhat unusual aesthetic of un-Earth-ly images, which are taken by often monochromatic, low-resolution cameras and only get their final look via the computer algorithms of scientists? Or is it just us, the viewers, being blasé after having seen everything? Everything?
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Why would someone load an 8x10 camera - a heavy and cumbersome piece of photographic equipment - into a small, inflatable craft and them move up the coast of Greenland to take photographs? There are probably many reasons for such an endeavour, and it would seem that picking just a single one would miss too many other important aspects. In that sense, treating Broken Line by Olaf Otto Becker as merely a book of landscapes, would be too one-dimensional.
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Andreas Gursky is one of the most important living photographers, despite the fact that his work is often being judged on nothing but else but its size or its price. While his photos are indeed monumental, size is merely a means to an end - as is obvious to a viewer who is confronted by one of Gursky’s photographs. The prints are not big simply because he can print them big, but because they have to be big, because of what they show and how they show it.
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Architecture is a form of art, just like photography or painting, and as such it says something about its time and about us. We, as spectators, often don’t see it as art - and how could we, if we are surrounded by, say, MacMansions? But who thinks of art in a Thomas Kinkade or Anne Geddes store? But then once we are exposed to what rises above the forgettable we just know that we are looking at a work of art, and not just that, we can usually even walk inside. Almost by construction (pun unintentional, but not unwelcome), contemporary architecture also contains an element of transition, an idea of showing us the world of tomorrow, or maybe more precisely what we hope the world of tomorrow might look like. Using architecture, we express our desire for a better future - and maybe that’s the reason why in the US - unlike in Europe - older architecture is often simply neglected and left to decay: Who wants to maintain the old, when they can get something new?
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There is no shortage of books about Havana and its decaying infrastructure, or about Paris and its architectural treasures; and there are many other such places which to some extent have been transformed into photographic clichés. “If Calcutta had the appeal of Havana,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s leading newspapers, wrote, “its palaces would long ago have become the subject of various coffee-table books.” And who says they don’t have that appeal? Thanks to Calcutta (Chitpur Road Neighborhoods), we now have the opportunity to see for ourselves.
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A great photography book is more than just a collection of photographs, regardless of how compelling those might be. It might ask questions, or it might present insight into a world unknown, or it might show the presence of a passionate vision - and it makes you want to come back to the images, so that you can re-immerse yourself. There is no doubt that Joakim Eskildsen and Cia Rinne’s The Roma Journeys easily satisfies all of these criteria.
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In the foreword to Chris Coekin’s Knock Three Times, David Campany calls Chris’ work “archeology of the present”, and I can’t think of a better phrase. In fact it could be applied to a lot of contemporary photography. The term archeology implies that someone is unearthing something, and while actual archeologists dig up yesterday’s people rubble and trash to then infer something about those people, photographers do it with what’s hidden in plain view. Of course, ‘hidden in plain view’ sounds like such a terrible cliché, but isn’t it also quite appropriate for what many people see but not notice?
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We live in a culture that reveres youth. That’s because on the average young people display the largest amounts of restraint, discipline, experience, and wisdom — all properties our culture thrives upon. On second thought, in the previous sentence “because” might not be the right word. In any case, if you want to find out about the lives of young people, you will not have to spend a lot of time on research. In fact, you won’t have to make any effort, since the lives of young people are on display everywhere.
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It is interesting to note that while we are led to believe that in photography the digital age is upon us, we are still far from understanding what it actually means. Despite the fact that for almost as long as we can think back photographs have been manipulated to show things not quite the way they were - with the Soviet Union’s erasing of disgraced persons being an especially perfidious example - and despite the fact that every little technical choice - colour versus b/w, saturated versus unsaturated, how to frame and how to crop, etc. - chips away at the idea of the absolute photographic truth, many of us still believe that a photograph shows us things the way they are; and the digital era has now brought the subject matter of photo manipulations into focus.
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The simple principle form follows function can be quite useful when trying to understand architecture: If a building has a certain purpose, then that purpose is expressed via the architecture. Thus, a building that looks like a prison in all likelihood is a prison (even though it might also be something else). As it turns out, in our modern world things appear to be somewhat more complicated. Of course, a confusion like this could mean that applying too simple a principle oversimplifies reality. But we could make things more interesting by assuming that form does indeed follow function and by then asking questions about what we see. Alternatively, we can take a building whose purpose we were told, but which does not really look like what we would have thought it might look like, and start thinking about that. Or, if we don’t feel like theorizing at all, we can look at a building or place and simply ask what kind of impression we get from looking at it. Regardless of how you approach the photography shown in Richard Ross’s Architecture of Authority, you are sure to feel quite uncomfortable about what you see, especially since the journey will take you to infamous places such as the Guantanamo Bay prison and Abu Ghraib.
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I have long been an avid follower of contemporary Chinese photography, which still is not quite as easily accessible as it should be. Fortunately, there is now a slowly increasing number of books showcasing Chinese photography, with 3030: New Photography in China being just the latest one of these.
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If you are an expatriate, someone who is living outside of his native country and culture, at some stage you get to realize that the cultural background of your host country divides into two parts, one which you can adapt to (given a surprisingly large amount of actual work) and another one, which will forever remain foreign to you. The latter I like to call the inexplicable, the stuff that will never make any real sense. Needless to say, you never get to understand what the inexplicable is as far as your home country is concerned, while it is quite easy to experience it in your host country. But to make matters even more confusing if a foreigner points out your own country’s idiosyncrasies you usually react with indignation - indignation simply because what other people often find outright absurd makes perfect sense to you! But things are easier to understand if we use an example. So - given I am an expat living in the US - let’s pick the issue of gun ownership in the US.
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It is somewhat of a cliché that contemporary photography has become sterile. It is supposed to be addicted to cold imagery, which is mostly devoid of humans. In any cliché, there is a grain of truth. But because it really is just a tiny grain and because the cliché ultimately is just an oversimplification and distortion, it does not provide a useful basis from which to explore contemporary photography. A beautiful example for why this cliché is so flawed is provided by Taj Forer’s Threefold Sun. Threefold Sun is firmly rooted in contemporary photography, and its photos contain a very quiet poetry.
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One of the internet’s inherent features is that you don’t really know who you are dealing with. I could be a teenage school girl, posing as a thirty nine year old research scientists who is very interested in contemporary photography (people who met me in person know that that’s not the case). In reality, though, it is a bit more likely that this posing would happen the other way around, especially if you entered the world of online games or “metaverses”, the most well known appear to be “Second Life”. I personally find these kinds of games not very interesting, and since I already have a life that I’m quite happy with, I don’t really need a second one. What I do find interesting, though, is to see what motivates people who participate in those kinds of online activities, and that’s exactly what Robbie Cooper’s Alter Ego is all about.
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What do we know about North Korea? Not much, and not surprisingly so. With the country being one of the most secluded places on Earth, it is also home to a despicable and outright bizarre dictatorship, which doesn’t exactly secure the country a top spot as a tourist attraction. In fact, most people probably wouldn’t know that it actually is possible for Westerners to visit North Korea: You apply four weeks in advance and provide a CV and a reference letter - requirements that might deter not just last-minute tourists. And once you’re accepted, just like in any other Communist dictatorship, you end up in a tour group, with a tour guide who’ll make sure that you basically can’t go anywhere on your own.
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There’s a certain thrill about finding a stranger’s family album at a thrift store and then to look at the life of that stranger and his or her family. Or rather the life as that stranger wanted to have it preserved, because - ultimately - as Martin Parr noted, family albums are really just propaganda: They are intended to show the family in a positive way. Of course, if you are aware of this, there still is nothing you can do about it, but you can try to work with it - and that is what Andrea Stern did with her Inheritance.
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When I was a teenager, I used to spend a fair amount of time with a group of like-minded peers at a local store, which sold audio equipment but also had a table with “home computers”. That was before 8bit computers had the aura of being “cool” (just like, as an aside, being a fan of Kraftwerk back then was considered anything but “hip”). In fact, when I programmed a Commodore 64 “home computer” to play Johann Sebastian Bach’s Italian Concerto at my high school’s chamber music concert and then also distributed a leaflet that claimed that computers were to play a major part in music, all I got was hundreds of quite blank stares. Or maybe it was me demonstrating what aforementioned Concerto sounded like when played backwards. I remember that some people were nodding wisely, because probably they had always figured that there was something strange about that quiet, lanky kid.
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If you take photos in a foreign land, they will be different from the photos taken by the people who live there, because what you see is unfamiliar (maybe even strange) for you. In the same fashion, when you view photos of a country, to a large extent your perception of what you see is guided by how much you know already about that country. In that sense, there is no absolute photographic truth of any given place, simply because your preconceptions (or their lack) will determine what you see. I think it is very important to keep this in mind when looking at books like Matthew Monteith’s Czech Eden (there are some sample photos from the book here).
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A little while ago, I went to Holland for work-related reasons, and I met up with two Dutch friends of mine. They had both lived in the town where I stayed for a few years, and they took me to meet friends of theirs. As it turned out, their friends have been spending the past ten years restoring (or maybe more accurately de-renovating) an old house. They have been taking out all the new stuff - windows, ceilings, floors, etc. - and they have been replacing it with materials from around the time when the house was built, many hundreds of years ago. I’m quite glad that I can say that I have seen lots of quite interesting things in my life, but this particular house was quite a unique experience. How often do you get to see individually hand-crafted Dutch tiles in a kitchen that is still being used? And how often do you get to know people who dig through the layers of debris underneath the mass produced new interior of an old house to look for those old tiles? When flying back home I spent the better part of the long flight regretting that I had foolishly turned down staying at that house (they had actually offered me to host me on a bed-and-breakfast basis) instead of at the two-star hotel right next to the highway (with my only defense - “Accomodation is being paid for, and I can’t get the bed and breakfast reimbursed” - sounding sadder and sadder every minute).
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There is a lot of very interesting photography coming out of China. Unfortunately, we do not get to see much of it in the West. What we do get get to see is photography produced by Westerners who go to China to cover what we like to refer to as the “economic miracle” and , thus, our view of China is skewed towards images of production, of vast urban development, of ecological disasters. While there is no doubt that there has been some quite amazing work by visitors to China (see, for example, my review of Edward Burtynsky’s ‘China’), living with such an incomplete picture is not very satisfactory - especially in the light of Chinese photography itself.
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The term “contemporary photography” implies we are dealing with something quite distinct from whatever was done in the past. In some sense, this is true, but only in part. Defining what contemporary photography is is not all that simple. Someone not familiar with this kind of photography once told me (after having looked at this blog) that contemporary photography was mostly “bleak, rural landscapes, hardworking portraits, or linear landscapes and interiors playing with shadows, contrasts and lighting”. Again, in some sense, that is true, just as it is true that if you were to describe contemporary literature you could say it is “lots of characters printed on paper, which describe the mostly dreadful lives of people, many of which have terrible problems.” (well, at least the kind of literature that I like to read, for example Philip Roth’s or Thomas Bernhard’s novels) Maybe I just defined what future academics will use as the benchmark definition of contemporary literature. It is quite a bit more likely, though, that my description misses so many aspects that it is quite useless - just like pointing towards “bleak landscapes” or “hardworking portraits” does not really tell us anything about what contemporary photography tries to achieve.
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I admit I am not all that much of a photographic theorist. While I do think that it is worthwile to look at what people have been doing in the past, I am a bit torn about studying what, say, Alfred Steiglitz and his group were discussing, at least as far as the theory of photography is concerned. What I do enjoy, though, is reading interviews with photographers or articles that give me an idea of what they were/are thinking about their work. Needless to say, this all is a matter of personal preference, and you might find yourself being bored with interviews but very excited about longish articles in the Benjamin-Barthes-Sontag mold. The Education of a Photographer is a new book that, I think, will be able to make everybody happy.
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Imagine you’re riding your bike and for whatever reason you run into a fence. It’s quite likely that the fence will not be all that impressed by the impact. It might or might not be a bit dented. A bit later, you see a car speeding down the same road, and for whatever reason that car then hits the fence. The fence gets flattened. There is nothing surprising about these events - unless you’re a conspiracy theorist. In that case, the fence was never hit by that car. Instead, the government sent an unmanned missile to hit the fence, while they also made the car disappear in a lake, never to be seen again. Sounds absurd? If it does you might be surprised that this kind of outline is actually very popular with conspiracy theorists to explain what happened on September 11, 2001.
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The success of the Chinese government to transform their country into something highly industrialized and economically powerful can hardly be denied. As a direct consequence, environmental problems in China have exploded, and if the country continues its current course, the consequences for itself and for the whole planet will be desastrous. Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed contains enough details in one of the final chapters, and there is no need (or space) to repeat them here.
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Given its nature, it is relatively hard to get a good overview of contemporary photography. Photography itself has only recently been fully accepted as an art form, and many people still have somewhat warped ideas of what photography as an art form looks like. If it wasn’t for the internet, finding interesting contemporary photography would probably quite a bit harder - especially if you happen to live in places (like yours truly) where people appear to think that a photo of a flower is cutting-edge contemporary photography. However, relying on places like this blog for your daily contemporary photography fix isn’t all that satisfying, a fact that becomes immediately obvious when you get the chance to see actual photos, displayed in a gallery or book. A photo online simply isn’t the same. Regeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow offers an introduction to fifty young photographers “of tomorrow”. I have to admit I find the idea quite silly that emerging photographers have to be young (maybe it’s just me and my own emerging grey hair that makes me say that), but still, the book provides you with short descriptions and lots of very nicely printed, high quality samples of fifty photographers, some of which you have already seen here, some not.
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There are many ways to tell history. I’m not a historian, and I don’t want to get involved in any arguments about how to do it. I am quite interested in history, though, and by that I mean past events. What happened? How did it happen? And what did it do to the people who lived through those times?
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It is quite possible that I would have never started this blog if Susan Bright’s Art Photography Now had been available a few years back. With the exception of Charlotte Cotton’s The Photograph as Contemporary Art Art Photography Now is maybe the only comprehensive book that will offer you an excellent introduction to contemporary photography.
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Window Seat by Julieanne Kost might appear to be a curious choice of a book for me to review. I think everybody, who has visited this site regularly, knows that I am no big fan of the immense hype generated about digital photography. So a book written by somebody who “serves as the Senior Digital Imaging Evangelist at Adobe”1 might cause quite a bit of eye-rolling at the end of the internet, where this is being written, and indeed I do have sore eye muscles now. However, I think Window Seat might be of interest for some regular visitors to this blog.
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It’s probably a futile endeavour to try to define what it is that spearates great photography from not-so-great photography. Often, great photography shows you something that you haven’t seen before. But there’s also great photography that shows you something that you haven’t seen that way before. Andrew Moore’s Russia is a book that does the latter.
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There can be no doubt that the “digital era” is upon us. While most people seem to think they know what that means for photography, when you look a little bit closer you come to the following conclusion. If you are willing to accept that the main - or maybe even the only - impact is that photographic work is getting so much easier and so much more convenient, then there isn’t really all that much to do other than to fawningly admire all the latest digital gizmoes. However, if you are interested in the actual changes and new possibilities that digital photography might offer technology is really just a footnote. When I bought Photography Reborn by Jonathan Lipkin what I was hoping for was a book on the latter. What I got was a book on the former.
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If it is the inventor in his (or her) garage, who has caught the imagination of large numbers of people, it might be safe to exclude the one who is spending a lot of time and effort on building a sophisticated contraption for sexual stimulation, aka a sex machine. That’s a pity. Kind of. After all, do we really want to know what drives people to invest money and time to hook up correctly sized and shaped artificial phalli to motors, some of which might or might not be taken from all kinds of other, seemingly more useful, machinery? Yes, I think we do - as Timothy Archibald shows us in his new book Sex Machines. But, before going into more details, let’s get this out of the way: There is very little nudity in this book - even if one is willing to include the phalli. The book is really more about the people who invent these machines and, if put into a larger context, about some of the things that are going on in suburbia or in small towns - those presumed islands of safety and cleanliness, away from the cities’ depravity and sins.
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The patchiness of information that can be found online mirrors the life and especially the art of Diane Arbus. There are brief introductions here and there, and you can find a couple of radio segments about her or one of her photos. Maybe there are simply too many “weird” photos - or photos of “weird” people or of people society doesn’t like to see: Just look at the photo entitled Patriot, and you realize there’s quite the divide between the official narrative and Diane Arbus’ photos, a divide that in the case of the Patriot photo maybe reflects how society has regressed back from its (partial) willingness to question the wars it was/is involved in, which alone would be worth discussing in detail. But let’s not digress. I don’t know whether the book entitled Revelations, which accompanies the extensive retrospective of her work that is currently touring, reveals much. But it is a fascinating experience. You can’t help but feel that the book and its contents have been very carefully assembled, with Diane Arbus’ daughter Doon Arbus in charge of the project. The book probably has not brought me any closer to gaining a better understanding of Diane Arbus’ life despite (because of?) the very detailed timeline with lots of quotes and letters etc. You don’t really gain much from reading through all of that. At the end, you find the statement “Her suicide seems neither inevitable nor spontaneous, neither perplexing nor intelligible.” followed by the details of the coroner’s report. I can’t help but feel that that is a very odd combination. One might want to read Patricia Bosworth’s biography to understand her life better. As far as the photography is concerned, Revelations couldn’t be any better. The photos are beautifully reproduced, and you get to see lots of “outtakes” and contact sheets of her work. Of course, you could argue about whether you really want to see work that Diane Arbus didn’t feel worthwhile showing. If you don’t want to see it you can save a lot of money by buying the Aperture book. I’m always interested in seeing how photographers create their work, so I enjoyed looking at the contact sheets. They are interesting: The exposures are quite uneven. However, she was a master printer, and I enjoyed reading an article written by her posthumous printer Neil Selkirk about how he re-created her photography’s signature look (which, apparently, does not require any dodging or burning). For example, if you look at the photo Boy with a Straw Hat on the contact sheet you can’t help but be amazed how she got the print to look so good. I think what I got out of reading through the book is that Diane Arbus should be considered as an artist first and then as a photographer. Maybe that’s where the revelation lies that the title promises.
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Contemporary photography has evolved in a way that does not always make it straightforward to categorize what one is dealing with. For example, you typically find the photography of the Bechers in art museums, even though - in principle - what they are doing is much closer to some sort of scientific documenting1. With the Becher’s very deadpan b/w surveys of buildings it’s relatively easy to argue that it’s documentary photography. But what about, for example, Candida Höfer’s work? Or, for that matter, Richard Ross’?
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If there is any one city that has been inspiring photographers the most it must be New York City. Situated on a narrow island, this moloch made of stone, concrete and steel contains some of the most potent symbols of modern and classic America: Wall Street, Broadway, Times Square, and, of course, the place known as “Ground Zero”. New York City became the target of Islamic fundamentalists, and for ultra-conservative Americans, it has also become the symbol of everything that (supposedly) is wrong with the country. What irony! The city’s magic is inescapable, and you can use it for pretty much anything - including the shameless exploitation of the deaths of 3,000 of New York’s inhabitants to win an election.
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