Last week, I went for a brief gallery tour in Chelsea, to see some shows I had been looking forward to a lot. Neo Rauch's was brilliant. Andreas Gursky's, at Gagosian, was a disaster (I have nothing to add to DLK's review). And then there was Nan Goldin's Scopophilia at Matthew Marks. Goldin is one of the 20th Century's most important photographic practitioners. Her Ballad of Sexual Dependency will forever stand as one of the shining moments of American photography. Scopophilia "pairs her own autobiographical images with new photographs of paintings and sculpture from the Louvre's collection" (to quote from the press release). (more)

So I went to look at those attempts. For the most part, Goldin had either paired her own photographs with photographs of paintings/sculptures in a one-on-one way, or she had combined sets of images just like in the case given at the top of this article (my photograph; the installation video will give you a better idea of what the show looked like). There is a lot to be said for this approach. After all, photography exists as part of a long history of art.

In a technical sense, photography did emerge out of nowhere. But in an artistic sense, photography has been influenced in all kinds of ways by other types of art. So pairing photographs with other pieces of art to distill something bigger out of both sounds like a tremendously interesting idea.

Needless to say, this only works if it's done well. I'm afraid, Scopophilia provides a great example of how not to do it. I suppose there is nothing wrong with taking photographs that show, say, a bunch of nude people and to then show parts of paintings that look just like that. Or to pair a photographic portrait of a person with a painting of a person that looks very similar.

But that's essentially artistic pattern recognition: Here's a nude, there's a nude, here's someone's hair down, there's someone's hair down, here's someone's stare, there's someone else's stare... You get the idea. What do you actually take away from such a show? That art has been dealing with the same human condition in pretty much the same way, regardless of whether it's photography, painting or sculpture? I want to believe we could aim for a higher bar to cross.

Scopophilia offers no insights whatsoever that make the viewer see the photographs in a new light. There are no surprises in the pairings, no new ways to see the work. It's an incredibly pedestrian exhibition: "this looks like that." I can't help but refer yet again to the Bill Hunt quote I posted yesterday: "The seeming representational nature of the medium is misleading because we will not find any real truth. As viewers, we should recognize how much subjectivity we bring to understanding images. We act like prisms." Scopophilia works off that seeming representational nature, not realizing it's really only seeming, and it then forces paintings and sculptures into that same flat plane.

Instead of "this looks like that" I would have loved to experience "This feels like that - even though it doesn't look similar." Now that would have probably blown my mind.

Part 2 of my coverage of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2011 takes me to the exhibitions at galleries and museums across the city. Just like in part 1, this is not a complete list of works exhibited. (more)

Another exhibition I had been looking forward to was Hans-Peter Feldmann's: "For 100 Jahre [100 Years] (2001), Hans-Peter Feldmann took one black-and-white photograph per year of his parents, friends, and acquaintances in order to reconstruct the length of a human life, situate himself in a chronology, and address life and death." This seemed like an obvious show, but once you started to walk along these photographs inevitably you started to reminisce and compare. Of course, I had to find the portrait corresponding to my own age, and of course, I had to look what the immediate future would hold for me. Very intriguing.

I had not been familiar with Cristina Nuñez's work before. In the description of her work in the program I had found "In 1988, in an attempt to overcome personal problems, Cristina Nuñez began to take self-portraits in private." I have always been quite skeptical of the idea that photography can be therapy - to simplify things a little - but on the wall, the selection of photography (taken from Someone to Love) worked very well.

Raymonde April presented a selection of work from her archives, created for Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, an idea I have lately been fascinated with: If all of the work in one's archives has a certain meaning (a project comes with a statement, outlining its purpose etc.), can one go back and create something else/different from all of this? This particular show presented just that, which I found extremely inspiring.

Just before traveling to Montréal I had conducted an interview with Michael Jones, Google's Chief Technology Advocate, for an upcoming edition of FOAM Magazine. One of the topics that had come up was that possibly in the future people would record their own lives constantly using video cameras. Turns out there are already artists doing such work, namely here Claire Savoie. Her videos were presented as videos and as a complex and large grid of still images. The latter I thought was quite spectacular, with its presentation of essentially part of a life, carefully edited and selected but at the same time seemingly random.

Luis Jacob also presented archival work, albeit using other people's images. This show was as "meta" as you could get about seeing and photography, looking at how we see things, how photographers see things, how photographers see us seeing things etc. Interestingly enough, the selection included a bunch of very well-known images by photographers such as Thomas Struth. I remember one of Struth's images from an art museum very smartly presented along with other photographs looking at the act of seeing and of displaying art. I had been very familiar with Struth's work, but Jacob's very careful recontextualisation of the images opened up a different reading for me.

(to be continued: part 3)

(all installation shots by JMC)

This past weekend, I went to Montréal, to see the exhibitions around this year's Le Mois de la Photo (Month of Photography) (on view until 9 October, 2011). I had never been to this particular festival, and I was curious about what made it differ from other festivals. The way it's set up is that there is a curator - this year Anne-Marie Ninacs - who defines a theme: "Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2011 features artists who, in a certain way, turn their cameras towards themselves and conceive of photography as an introspective process, an opportunity for meditation, a mode of consciousness, even a means of revealing the unconscious." As you can imagine this description leaves considerable leeway to create exhibitions around it, something which was done - I thought - rather successfully. (more)

The Arsenal is just what you'd imagine it would be - you might compare it to New York City's Park Avenue Armory, say. Inside, temporary walls had been erected to create an exhibition space (see photographs).

Of course, I was aware of several of the photographers in this show, but there were also some I had never heard of. The Arsenal show went beyond "mere" photography, to include video and installation pieces, which I thought worked very well. There's absolutely nothing wrong with photography, of course, but it does make perfect sense to show video pieces or to even expand further into installation art.

In the following, I'm not going to talk about each artist in this space but will focus on a - subjective - selection.

In a sense, Roger Ballen has moved beyond photography already. His latest work relies on pretty elaborately staged scenes, involving temporary sculptures and drawings. This is "revealing the unconscious" alright: At times disturbing, but always strangely moving, one is left to wonder how far Ballen will take his work.

Jack Burman's The Dead is more literal, in fact it is just that: Huge photographs of corpses (or part of corpses). This work is as disturbing as Ballen's, albeit in a somewhat different way. Despite the initial shock value it also offers some surprising depth (I could see how many people would be unwilling to stay long enough to experience that).

I had no idea who Gemmiform were before I came to Montréal, but I liked what I saw very much: Video pieces that reminded me a bit of the kinds of electronic-music videos I used to watch a few years ago (they're still being made, I just stopped watching). Projected on a wall in a dark room, their effect is very different from seeing them on some screen at home; and I really enjoyed how well they fit into the context of this exhibition.

Augustin Rebetez had created an elaborate installation of his work, mostly photography, but with all kinds of other things added. This worked very well and made the photographs come alive in an almost surprising fashion.

Lastly, there was Rinko Kawauchi, one of Japan's newly emerged photography stars. Of course, I was very familiar with her work - both in book form and on the wall. I own one (or maybe two) of her books. The books are delicate affairs, with their modest sizes - just like the photographs. What I have always been puzzled by is why all the exhibitions I had seen so far were the exact opposite: Very large prints on the wall, hung in a straight line.

Of course, everybody loves big prints made from big negatives with big, big cameras. There almost is a certain machoism around it, isn't there: You walk into a room to see big prints, and you want to pound your chest King-Kong style and belt "Oh yeah, baby!" That won't work with Kawauchi's work, though. I have always been puzzled by this. In Montréal, there were many large prints, hung in a row. I went into the space, had a brief peek and thought "Oh no."

But somehow I kept walking around the space (looking for a good angle for my installation photo), and I found a little alcove where, what a surprise!, there was something different: Small prints, without a frame, but instead mounted behind plexiglass, hung in little clusters (plus a video screen). It was a revelation! That is how I think Kawauchi's work needs to be seen. I have no words to describe the added level of preciousness, the fact that finally the work on the wall offered a similar experience to looking at one of the books (To give you an idea of the contrast between the two parts, I took a picture showing one of the big frames on the left and a cluster of smaller images on the right). It was truly wonderful.

(to be continued: part 2, part 3)

(all installation photographs by JMC)

When I asked Seth Boyd and Richard Renaldi what made a good photobook (as part of my conversation with them), Seth said "Good pictures. Just good pictures. That sounds ludicrously simplistic, but that's all I want when I look at a book: to see amazing images." Once you put images on a wall, this becomes even more obvious: A good exhibition features good photographs. Of course, there are OK shows (lots of those) and good shows (fewer, but still a lot), and then there are great shows. Great shows will make you come back (if you can). Great shows are when you think you know what to expect, but once you're there you know that something is happening that's hard to describe. It's almost magical. Great shows are rare. If you want to see a great show right now, see Sze Tsung Leong's Cities, on view at Yossi Milo Gallery (until April 2, 2011). (more)

To produce these images, the artist has been traveling all over the globe, pointing his camera at, well, cities. How do you take a photo of a city? You go somewhere higher up, and you make sure you get as much of the city as you can. It's really as simple as that. If you were to ask what made a great photo, maybe a good first answer would be "a simple idea." If you were to ask how to produce a great show out of great photos, I suppose there's a simple answer, too: Get the photos printed properly, making sure they have the right size, get them framed, and hang them on the wall.

Describing it that way might make you wonder why Cities is so special, and that's where things get a little hard to explain. Everything was done just so perfectly, while looking so effortlessly. It would (must?) have been so tempting to go for effect, to produce billboard-size prints... Well, actually, the artist did go for effect, but it's done in such a subtle and controlled way that you don't even realize what's going on. You just realize that while you are looking at all those cities, you see them through the artist's eyes, in the most perfect way.

Looking at these images on your computer screen won't do, of course. You really have to see these images on the wall to be able to appreciate what they do. I could probably blabber on now, getting all those words out of the art critic's box, talking about the "sublime," for example, or any of the other stuff that so often gets used to inflate review word counts.

But maybe I'll just add this: If you still need to get convinced that photography can be art, then go and see Cities. There'll be photographs on the wall, but you'll be looking at art, at the tremendously inspiring vision of an artist who happens to be a photographer.

Easily the best show I have seen in many months.

There is something somewhat deceiving about Youssef Nabil's exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery, and that's the fact that somehow, the images make you think that you've seen this before. Except that you haven't. These images are all recent, they are not vintage images unearthed at some flea market or in some photographer's archives somewhere. They are "hand-colored gelatin silver prints are carefully crafted portraits inspired by Egyptian movie posters and films of the 1940s and 1950s." (quoted from the press release) (more)

I suppose what I'm really after is that if the hand-colouring is used just for what it is, it's a gimmick. Once you look at some of the other work in this exhibition you will realize that there are many other images where the technique is used for narrative effect. Of course, that points to something I talked about previously: Any image that relies fully and only on the photographic technique used to create it has very little to offer other than, well, being testament of the artist's ability to work with said technique. The very successful images in this show, and there are many of them, use the hand-colouring to deceive the viewer, to lead her or him down a road, and to then abandon her or him: See, this is all very romantic, very idealized, except that it isn't.

For me, the movie connection doesn't even matter that much, or to be more precise: Not at all. What truly matters is that the viewer is taken out of some context into another context, and her or his cultural images (and, possibly, collection of stereotypes) then does the rest. So it's not very clear what exactly you are actually looking at when you think you understand what you see: The photograph or your own ideas of what images that look like this mean.

And you realize what nostalgia really is: It's not looking back at an old, ideal images - it's looking at new images, coloured and changed to look appealing, a reality that never existed that way.

For an alternative take see DLK's review

For the past few days, I have been trying to come up with a joke that starts with "How many water towers does it take to..." Unfortunately, humour (just like so many things) is (are) clearly not my forte. Not that Bernd and Hilla Becher's work has anything to do with humour anyway. This is no laughing matter, ladies and gentlemen! In any case, the Bechers' photography seems to be a good case of ye olde "if you've seen one you've seen it all," except what they're trying to show is the exact opposite. Because, you see, they - the water towers in this case - are all a little bit different (click on the image above and you will see). This, of course, makes for a neat reference: Karl Blossfeld, another German artist obsessed with shapes of things, in his case plants. (more)

I think that room provides the very best way to fully understand the Bechers' achievement, the true point behind their work, both conceptually and technically. If you have never seen this work this is the show to see.

Still, there are parts of me that appreciate Bernd and Hilla Becher more for what they did at the Düsseldorf Art Academy than for their photography. I know I shouldn't say this. This is probably in part due to the fact that if I ever shed tears over conceptual art it's mostly because of, well, boredom. There are only so many water towers or gas tanks or whatever else you can look at before you will say "No, really, I do get it."

Needless to say, that's my personal preference. I do think it was extremely important to create a visual archive of many of those industrial structures that are now gone; but I'm probably not interested enough to think that you really need to see each and every one of them. There is a level of obsessiveness behind this endeavour, which I'm fascinated and slightly uncomfortable with.

The one thing you will notice when you visit this show is how well the Bechers did this work. Everybody and their grandmother are producing typologies now, but if you look at the Bechers, you see how they really need to be done: Each of the images is perfect. There's no sloppiness. You don't see typologies done so perfectly too often. In fact, when you see them you can almost be certain it's the Bechers. It's pretty amazing actually. So this show also is testament to the enormous amounts of hard, hard work these two German artists put into their photography.

compare: DLK's review

The story is simple: There are documentary photography and photojournalism, which aim at showing us the world as it is, and then there's all the rest, which doesn't. Especially not when we're dealing with staged photography. In a nutshell, this is what one could call photographic orthodoxy. Photographic orthodoxy is in no good shape any longer, for a large variety of reasons (the idea that a photograph could ever be an objective depiction of the world is fundamentally flawed is just one problem). So it recently has required an ever increasing amount of support beams ("photo illustrations" vs. photographs etc.). Needless to say, the problems won't go away. You can whistle as much as you want in the dark, it won't help. If you've followed this blog even just semi-regularly you're probably aware of the fact that I find this situation rather unfortunate. In this day and age, photography still is less than it could be: Just like in any other area, orthodoxy always stands in the way of potentials being fulfilled. (more)

In principle, that should tell us something, but of course, we also need to be careful here.

The problems with France's banlieues are very real, and they involve a large number of factors: Unemployment, race, religion, poverty, social issues, immigration, etc. This article is a good starting point if you want to read up on the issues. You can't properly understand Périphéries without knowing anything about the world it portrays. But even if you don't know the background, the images will still affect you, simply because of what you, the viewer, bring to the table.

Strictly speaking, Périphéries is not real, it's art. But toss orthodoxy aside for a moment, and everything about Périphéries is very real. Here we have a young photographer working with images - even alluding to traditional paintings - to portray a veritable powder keg, in what I think might be one of the most arresting bodies of work dealing with the banlieues I've seen so far.

Bourouissa pushes the boundaries in very convincing ways, and he does it in such a smart way that it's easy to miss what he is doing. What seems clear is how he is doing it: By staging photographs to portray a complex world. An excellent show.

Further reading: DLK's review

When you see Julian Faulhaber's photography you're tempted to think that if you were to pry off the plexiglass sheet from the photographic paper there'd be no image left, because it's actually somehow contained in the plastic. Lest we misunderstand us here, that's a compliment. If there's any doubt about the merits of "Diasec," seeing these photographs should put them to rest - here, it works beautifully. Faulhaber's current show at Hasted Hunt Kraeutler (on view until June 26, 2010) offers a good opportunity to see the work. It is called "Lowdensitypolyethylene II" (of course!), and it's a bit of a guilty pleasure. (more)

It's those kinds of dystopias that Faulhaber depicts, in the most beautiful colours. It's all so neat and clean and shiny and terrifyingly beautiful! In part this is because the artist takes the photos before all of these dystopias are being put to use.

It is important to realize that the beauty here is not quite as superficial as it might appear: the images might be very decorative, but they also increase the viewer's level of discomfort. Everything simply is too neat and clean, too artificial, and one shudders to imagine actual human beings having to deal with them. If you've ever had a five-hour layover at Frankfurt airport you know what I mean.

Trine Søndergaard's portraiture never gets boring or predictable. If you know the Monochrome Portraits, you're sure to get surprised by Strude, on view at Bruce Silverstein gallery (until June 26, 2010). When I walked into the gallery, I thought the photographer had engaged in some sort of conceptual art, wrapping people in scarves and putting hats on them. In fact, only today did I realize that what I thought was conceptual art in reality is the "the mask-like garment that was worn by women on the Danish island of Fanø to cover their faces from the wind, sun and sand." (quoted from the press release). Well, there's something for art critics to ponder (who might put off reading the often insufferable Chelsea press releases until the last minute) - and for those who think that if it looks weird - or at least unusual - it has got to be modern art. (more)

Remembering my first impressions seeing the work... I think what contributed to making me think it was some sort of conceptual art was the poses the photographer used. In some cases, the results are incredibly beautiful (here's an image that I remember vividly). Other cases - like this one - I thought were just not very convincing at all. In Strude, the garment is given center stage, but I am not sure that works in all cases(ethnographers/anthropologists might disagree). The photographs I ended up liking a lot were portraits of people wearing some dress I wasn't familiar with, the photographs I didn't like where those of some dress I wasn't familiar with that happened to contain a person.

That all said, Strude is not to be missed, given that the good portraits are so unbelievably good.

Ed Winkleman is on a roll. After staging #class (pronounced "hashtag class", my own interpretation was funnier, yet turned out to be incorrect), there now is American ReConstruction, "an exhibition of new photography," organized by Michael Hoeh. In a day and age where everybody supposedly is a curator, Michael Hoeh, of Modern Art Obsession fame, organized the show. Can we have a moment of silence now, so that this will sink in? (btw, if you click on the image above you can see a much larger version, and yes this wraps around a bit further than it should) (more)

They might as well have called it "curated" - of all the curated shows I saw this past weekend, this was one of the two (out of a grand total of six) that clearly worked.

Being wrong about something is not such a bad thing - it gives you the chance to learn something. I don't want to pretend I figured out all the secrets behind American ReConstruction, but I have an inkling why what I thought was a flimsy concept in fact isn't: It would have been, had the curator organizer taken it too literally and/or narrowly. But Michael Hoeh didn't. In fact, it took me a while to see connections between the images in the show; and of course, that's what makes American ReConstruction so compelling: It makes you think, it actually makes you discover things, and it's fun.

So the exhibition is more than just the sum of its - btw excellent - parts, and for me, that is how a group show of photography turns into something bigger. But of course, I've written about this before, and I'm turning into that old broken record again.

Given I was very familiar with some of the work in American ReConstruction, picking highlights is a bit of an iffy endeavour (plus all the other artists will be mad at me). Still, Mark Lyon's prints stood out - those are bold, beautiful photographs, filled with humour.

If you happen to be in Chelsea, American ReConstruction is not to be missed. It's still on view until June 12, 2010.

The images coming from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were dominated from a combination of what was carefully staged and controlled, what emerged in an uncontrolled fashion, and of what a new generation of photojournalists, working under the toughest of circumstances, produced. There was the commander-in-chief posing in a uniform and proclaiming "MIssion Accomplished", there were the gruesome images from Abu Ghraib, Tim Hetherington's award-winning photo, the controversy about a photo of a fatally wounded US soldier, plus a lot more. None of these images have entered the world of David Levinthal's I.E.D.: War in Afghanistan and Iraq, which was on view at Stellan Holm recently: The artist is still playing with dolls (click on the image above for a larger view).

Of course, you could argue that all these questions are just too much. Can't an artist produce some art without having to talk about the big issues? Well, sure. Here's the problem, though: art work explicitly produced to talk about these two wars has to be confronted with such questions; and I don't think I.E.D.: War in Afghanistan and Iraq holds up very well.

For me, this is a big problem especially since the press release of the show contains the following:

"However, these photographs do not simply recreate scenes from a foreign war. Instead they bring a new perspective to the discourse about war, how it is broadcast in real time and how it relates to American society as a whole. Without interjecting his own prejudgments, David Levinthal asks the viewer to reconsider their own perceptions of reality."

And why is it so important to mention that Levinthal was not "interjecting his own prejudgments"? What is art without prejudgments? Aren't people smart enough to come to their own conclusions, regardless of what the "prejudgment" might be like? Of course, I can only talk for myself, but dear artists, please prejudge - I'll be perfectly able to navigate my way around!

Or are we to believe that seeing I.E.D.: War in Afghanistan and Iraq is akin to watching some "fair and balanced" TV program, where we are (supposedly) presented with the facts and only the facts, so we can make up our own minds? Seriously? Is that how art is supposed to work?

Make no mistake, we do sorely need a "a new perspective to the discourse about war, how it is broadcast in real time and how it relates to American society as a whole." But I.E.D.: War in Afghanistan and Iraq offers a very old perspective, a perspective that is oblivious of snapshots taken by military personal and/or civilians, oblivious to shamelessly staged photos, oblivious to all the other various new types of images and/or discussions of imagery we have witnessed over the past years, and, most importantly, oblivious to the huge changes in our own thinking and understanding of images.

Without such a new perspective, I.E.D.: War in Afghanistan and Iraq doesn't offer anything beyond what the toy soldiers used to produce these images have to offer: A very simplified and almost childish image of two wars.

Further reading: DLK's review