“[Garry] Winogrand was famous for never asking people permission before taking their photographs;” writes Caille Millner in a review of the photographer’s current retrospective at SFMoMA, “a whole generation of male photographers idolized him for shooting however he wanted, whenever he wanted.” It’s not hard to imagine what the legions of Winogrand fans will have made of Millner’s review, which continues “No one seems to recognize that Winogrand’s beliefs are shared most seriously by the kinds of men who haunt Reddit subforums like ‘Creepshots.’ On those forums, the chorus is ‘Rape her.’ Thanks to his superior sense of aesthetics, Winogrand’s moments of lechery show up at SFMOMA, where the chorus is that he’s a visionary.” (more)
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For the past couple of weeks, I have come to this photography, Riverfront, by Curran Hatleberg (if you click on the image you’ll see a larger version). I’ve been trying to find out what actually intrigued me about it. Most likely, it’s a combination of factors. For a start, Riverfront is one of those photographs that is very smartly constructed. It’s complex without it being complex for complexity’s sake. It’s smart, without it being self-consciously smart (like, for example, so much of that “new formalism”/”triangle art” photography: I can’t escape the feeling it’s too satisfied with its own cleverness). It’s a contemporary photograph that, at the same time, feels like a classic; or maybe I should say it references the medium’s history without being nostalgic. (more)
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This photographs looks like an image made using the wet-plate process, but it’s merely a simulation if you will. I took this picture with my minipad, using the Hipstamatic Tintype package. It’s fairly safe to assume that tor a sizable part of photoland, a digital image that looks like a wet-plate image cannot be judged the same way as a an actual wet-plate one. In the following, I will try to explain why that is a pretty severe mistake. (more; updated)
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Juror Michel Millard picked Karen Miranda Rivadeneira’s Other Stories/Historias Bravas as a winner of the Conscientious Portfolio Competition 2012, writing The images which have touched me and attracted me the most are Karen Miranda Rivadeneira’s. I found this series of images very interesting as they are a touching mix of reportage meets fiction meets mise en scene. They are very human as they deal with big general themes such as life, childhood, adolescence, motherhood, death, and at the same time with details and particularities. They are exotic and very personal. I like that the photographic approach is not overstated, it is precise but very simple. Every frame is filled with humanity. I’d like to see many more of them. In the following conversation, I spoke with the photographer about her work. (more)
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Not long ago, two writers on photography found themselves in broad agreement when each approached some pretty fundamental questions at the core of photography in curiously similar terms. One wrote (and posted a short video) on how it was worth trying to bear in mind that some things patently ‘matter’ in photography and others equally do not. The other wrote that identifying what was ‘at stake’ in a photographic project was a useful way of ascribing value to some things and withholding it from others. At that stage they acted separately. But since writing on subjects like these is all about engaging others in conversation, one invited the other to get in touch, and they have exchanged a number of e-mails batting ideas around. (more)
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Photography has finally come full circle so that it can investigate itself and its uses, the latter of course being the aspect where things get interesting. Lisa Fairstein’s Ultra-Static throws the viewer right into a seemingly absurd world, which, however, feels oddly familiar (because it is). Pulling together references from different areas of photography the resulting images offer no relief in the form of advertizing or magazine copy, which would allow us to filter the imagery. Instead, we are left with photography’s artifice, with all that photography is so good at, and bad at. Find a conversation with the photographer below. (more)
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Let’s face it, the tedium of seeing the sheer endless stream of photographs on Tumblr, images that might or might not be properly attributed, is just depressing. We might be all photographers now, but does that mean that we all have to be mindless consumers as well? Of course, our late-capitalist culture is based on just that, on people turning into consumers without questioning what is going on. But what do we actually gain from applying that model to photography? (more)
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I am not going to actually show the photograph I am going to write about. I realize this is most unusual. But I hope that my reasons will become obvious in the following. The photograph I am going to talk about shows a young woman in the center of the frame who is surrounded by six male figures (there is a seventh in the background who does not appear to be part of what is going on). Of these six males, five are photographers. They’re photographers we call paparazzi. The young woman - actress Sienna Miller - is caught “mid-action”: Her posture looks defensive, her arms are raised, in particular her right one, as if to defend herself from the paparazzo at the left edge of the frame whose gaze is centered on her. The man at the right edge of the frame does not appear to be a photographer, he is looking at the paparazzo at the left edge. We might add that there must have been at least one other photographer present, the one who took the photograph in question. (more)
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Hye-Ryoung Min’s Channel 247 was picked by Robert Lyons as one of the winners of the Conscientious Portfolio Competition 2012. He wrote “I first got it down to five different portfolios. But I kept coming back to Hye-Ryoung Min’s, whose work struck me the first time I looked at it, and it has only grown since. The images really suggest time beyond the moment of the picture. They are well composed, and each image suggests an interesting situation. The formal aspects seem to hold the group together. Although at first one feels as if these are ‘surveillance’ images - at least by the framing, and by things that obscure the images - one quickly is able to see how they are much more.” I spoke with Hye-Ryoung Min about the work. Find our conversation below. (more)
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This photograph by Chris Levine, Lightness of Being, is extraordinary for a variety of reasons, the most important one possibly being that it utterly confounds our expectations1. We live in a day and age where usually the opposite is true: Photographs of public figures are made to show us what we expect, ideally in the most glorious form. We could call this our cultural sublime: Getting awed in exactly the way we expect to get awed. In the strictest sense, this type of sublime is at least 50% fake, because what we’re ultimately really in awe of is our own (imagined) sense of good taste. (more)
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Olivia Locher, an extremely prolific photographer, is one of the winners of the 2012 Conscientious Portfolio Competition. Justifying my choice I wrote: “With so much talk about photography being over or dead, we might as well admit that it is, have a jazz funeral, and continue enjoying the medium, now more than ever. I think this is what Olivia Locher is doing with Another Day on Earth, fearlessly unafraid to produce pictures that either conform to or subvert standard conventions. Photography is dead - long live photography!” I spoke with the artist about her approach to photography in the conversation you can find below. (more)
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I found myself at the local mall yesterday, at the book shop, to look at magazines. I live in the countryside where not much ever happens. A tornado might come through, or a strip club might explode, but those are very rare events. And regardless, they tend to happen further down south. I certainly did not expect to look up from some magazine to see a car on fire right outside of the building I was in. (more)
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What you see in this photograph is what I see in it, a man that none of us have ever met. I can say that with certainty because I know just a little bit, albeit not much, more about this man. He is, or actually was, Josef Nowak, an accountant born in what is now the Czech Republic, a citizen of Germany when it was called Nazi Germany, an avid multi-instrumentalist (mostly playing the accordion, though), and, just like millions of others, a soldier, drafted to fight in World War 2. Josef Nowak was killed (“fell”) on 21 March 1942 in what was then the Soviet Union. There was not going to be another spring in his life, and for a long time there was none in his wife’s (now widow’s) who on the very day that her husband died gave birth to their fourth daughter. That fourth daughter is my mother’s youngest sister. Josef Nowak is my grandfather. (more)
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There’s a type of puzzles called connect the dots: A sheet of paper contains a set of dots that have numbers next to them, and when you connect the dots in order you get a simple line drawing. You can tell stories with pictures that way, ideally in a book: One photograph brings you to the next, which then bring you to the next etc. etc., and there is your story! Phrased this way, the connect-the-dots type of photographic storytelling sounds incredibly simple, if not outright simplistic, but usually, it’s anything but. The reason is that unlike in that puzzle what you start out with are just dots or, to stay in the picture developed in previous articles, clouds. Which one is first? Which one will come second? And how do you know that a dot or cloud has to go, in other words how do you edit? (more)
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A simple way to summarize what I talked about in part one of How to tell a story with pictures would be to say: “To tell a story with pictures you first have to understand how photographs operate.” That sounds obvious and simple, yet is not a given. By its nature, photography lends itself to simple, often literal interpretations, and such an approach can only lead to simple, if not simplistic stories. Before proceeding, I need to talk about what I actually mean when I use the word “story.” (more)
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If I wanted to tell a story with pictures, just with pictures, how would I go about that? I could probably give you one photograph (see above) and tell you that’s my story. Chances are you wouldn’t take that for much of a story. And you’d probably be right, even though some photographers manage to tell stories with single pictures. But for the most part, we think of photographs as something else, not as stories, but as facts or documents. Or maybe it would be better to state that we think of photographs more as facts than as stories. This was summed up by Aaron Schuman who stated: “A photograph is only a minute fragment of an experience, but quite a precise, detailed, and telling fragment. And although it might only provide little clues, the photographer is telling us that they are very important clues.” (more)
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Earlier this year, social-media behemoth Facebook announced that every day, its user were uploading 300 million images per day. That’s a pretty impressive number, the relevance of which, I think, is debatable, though. Regardless of what you make of the number, it’s fairly obvious that photography is being widely used. It might be worthwhile to point out that the vast majority of photographs created on this planet are not being produced by artists, professionals, or academics - unlike the vast majority of writing about photography. So when I read that someone writes how people mistrust photography I always wonder why there are 300 million new photographs on Facebook every day when nobody trusts photography. That aside, Facebook and the internet as a whole appear to be a pretty spectacular archive or library of photographs. This is where it gets interesting. (more)
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In an earlier article, I argued that it’s essential for photographers to carefully take the presentation of their work online into consideration. Instead of keeping things mostly theoretical, I thought I’d follow up with an article discussing examples. There probably will be considerable disagreement about what is the best presentation of photography on the web, but the following list might serve as a starting point for more discussions. Of course, the list is not supposed to be representative or complete in any kind of sense. (more)
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This is not a good time for writing, since it’s such a bad time for reading, especially on the web. I’ve been castigating photography for its increasing reliance on what I call one liners - quick photo projects that require at most five minutes of your time and that, of course, are ideal fodder for online consumption. But photography really is just part of a larger culture that does not value thoughts any longer that can’t be summed up in a single sentence or, god forbid, thoughts that can’t even be summed up at all. The horror, the horror! We want certainty, and we want it quickly and easily. So why then even spend more time thinking about photography and writing, when I’m already sounding old or old-fashioned or both? (more)
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Ask any photographer what they’re working on, and they’re sure to tell you about their project. It’s almost as if these days photographers don’t take pictures any longer, they take projects. This being the internet, it would be tempting to simply find someone to blame. Pretend you’re raising a question, and you’d be ready to go: “Have art schools (alternatively: galleries, bloggers, photographers, photobooks, everybody’s grandmothers, whoever else you can think of) killed photography by insisting on projects?” But it’s easy to see how little would be gained from that approach. Instead, it might be worthwhile to try to probe a little deeper. (more)
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Last week, a flurry of articles and commentaries about Instagram/Hipstamatic was published, many of them bemoaning the apps’ popularity, arguing, in some way or another, that the apps were bad for photography. Two articles appeared to be breaking out of the circles most of the other ones seem(ed) to be running in. Jon Anderson wrote about ‘democratization’ and what that might really mean. And David Campbell asked for the conversation to move forward, instead of incessantly focusing on aesthetics. For that to happen, I think we need to realize that context matters. (more)
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Edward Rozzo wrote a response to my Photography After Photography? (A Provocation). I’m very much interested in continuing the debate, because I think there is something to be gained here. Rozzo and I seem to be in agreement about various things, but of course it’s always much more interesting to first talk about what we can’t (yet?) agree on. (more)
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Over the past decades, the photograph itself, the object on the wall, has become more important. Why is that? I actually think there is no simple answer. Instead, we seem to be witnessing several developments coming together at the same time. (more)
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“The face,” Cicero (106-43 B.C.) is supposed to have said, “is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter” (“Ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi”), and we know this as “the eyes are the window to the soul.” Scientists, oddly, seem to agree. And this is all fine, except that we have a problem here. What about the blind? Ordinarily, I don’t take those kinds of expressions for more than what they are. In particular, I try to avoid them in my writing, fighting my own hopeless war against cliché (in all likelihood a much paler version of the original one). But I saw this particular photography, a portrait of Frederick Lennart Bentley, taken by Martin Roemers and part of his The Eyes of War (which I reviewed here), and that’s the first thing that came to my mind (which, apparently and much to my consternation, is quite content with cliché). Click on the image on the side to see it fill your screen. (more)
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The last thing anyone needs is rehashing the old debate about analog and digital in photography. I never found that discussion so interesting in the first place. I am perfectly comfortable with both analog and digital photography. Cameras are tools, and I’m personally not necessarily interested in talking about tools. That said, this might be too simplistic a description of my view. So let me try that again. (more)
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Photography liberated painting from the existential burden to depict. With the advent of photography, painting was finally able to move sideways and forward, blossoming in all kinds of directions. Who - or what - is going to do that for photography? (more)
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OK. Photography is memory. Photography is a construct, just like our memory. Photography is a great tool to serve our purpose of constructing our memory. We’re our own propagandists who, just like all propagandists, know that what we’re saying is not necessarily true. But what matters is that we make ourselves believe it is true. Or rather we treat our memories just like we treat announcements in advertizing that always come with the asterisk and all the fine print. We know that “certain restrictions apply.” But photography allows us to try to make those restrictions go away, or at least to reduce the amount of exceptions. (more)
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Photography is memory. Memory is photography. If it only were that simple! Maybe we need to be more precise. It’s never a good idea to begin an article with nitpicking, but in this case there is no other way. According to Collins English Dictionary (accessed via dictionary.com) memory, the word, can stand for somewhat different things, including “the sum of everything retained by the mind” and “a particular recollection of an event, person, etc”. Let’s focus on the latter here, the particular recollection of something. We can hope that once we’ve figured out how photographs work as such recollections, we will be able to say something about how photographs relate to the whole, the sum of everything retained in the mind. (more)
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I thought it might not hurt to address the thoughts I recently outlined in Photography and Place, using a specific location as an example. Given the photographic representation of Appalachia has been very heavily discussed over the past few weeks (c.f. the Perpetuating the Visual Myth of Appalachia posts on Roger May’s blog) I figured this particular region might provide a good jump-off point. (more)
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Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood (also see the publisher’s website and my review) made it onto so many “best of 2011” lists that it was by far the most popular book last year. A body of amazing depth and sophistication, it is a shining example of what the contemporary photobook can do. There now is a second edition, and I used the occasion to talk with Christian about the book. Find the full piece below. (more)
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Now here’s a picture for our times: A photograph taken by Alexander Gardner in 1865, a portrait of Lewis Payne, one of the men involved in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. If there ever was defiance, here we’d have it, and we love that kind of attitude, even (especially?) if it is on display by a soon-to-be-convicted (and hanged) criminal. It’s a handsome face, too, oddly out of time: You wouldn’t be surprised to meet someone looking, even dressing like this, in a local coffee shop. But Payne also looks like the hero in every movie - the dashing main figure who will escape into the night even if all his accomplices get caught or killed, the ruthless killer or violent lunatic that we still root for (think “Doug MacRay” in The Town). (more)
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Anouk Kruithof is one of the recipients of this year’s ICP Infinity Awards. Over the past few years, she has produced a string of cutting-edge books, many of them self-published. So there were many reasons why I wanted to talk to her about her work. (more)
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Photography obviously is centered on seeing and looking. It’s us - via a photographer’s helping hands and eyes - looking at them - the people in the photographs. For that very reason, I have been quite intrigued by Man peering in window, Knoxville by Mark Steinmetz (from South Central) ever since I first came across it. People love to complain that the subjects in contemporary portraiture do not smile. But strangely, I have never heard (or read) anyone complain about the fact that they don’t look back. It’s not as if they were unable to do that. Just look at Steinmetz’s Man! If you could say one thing about him it is that he clearly is looking back. In fact, it’s almost tempting to tell him to stop looking at us! (more)
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My headline is slight disingenuous: There actually is no simple recipe for photobook making. If you asked ten people about how to make a photobook, you’d probably end up with ten different answers. That said, from what I can tell, most photobook makers seem to agree on quite a few things. So I thought I’d throw my own thoughts into the mix. I hope that some people might find them useful. (more)
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It’s such a sad old feeling the fields are soft and green it’s memories that I’m stealing but you’re innocent when you dream when you dream you’re innocent when you dream (from Tom Waits’ Innocent When You Dream) The first time I saw Tim Hetherington’s Sleeping Soldiers - I think it was actually a video presentation - I immediately had to think of that Tom Waits song. And then I thought what a marvelous piece of propaganda I was looking at. (more)
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We have abandoned our belief in ancient myths and folk tales, we have replaced them with our own, modern, presumably enlightened ones. There is no more goddess Venus, there is the razor instead or the pop song (enjoy counting the ancient myths in this version). Here then is our Venus, photographed by Rineke Dijkstra. Reflecting our times, our Venus is anonymous, but we get to find out where and when the photograph was taken: Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, USA June 24 1992. (more)
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There is the idea that photography steals the soul. We think that is a childish, a primitive belief. But photography’s, or more accurately the camera’s presence has a strange power over us that is not that far from stealing our soul. I had to think of that when I came across this photograph while researching images for a class on the history of photography. This is a photograph by Alexander Gardner entitled Antietam, Md. Confederate dead in a ditch on the right wing, one of the many the photographer produced around that Civil War battle (see the technical notes at the very bottom for more information about it). (more)
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Our memories are our own personal histories. As we age, they accumulate, usually in flattering, merciful ways. This is how Nature has our brains operate, to allow us to preserve a modicum of dignity (or what we think dignity might be). On the other side, the literally other side: the surface of the skull, Nature tends to be less kind. Here, we cannot easily hide that which we do not want to share. In our faces, we see our history, we see what life has done to us. As we age, we age visibly. (more)
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In photography, trust and doubt are like yin and yang: You cannot have one without the other, you have to balance one against the other. Trust and doubt exist in a complex relationship. They don’t just have to balance each other, they also have to drive each other. Trust has a lot to do with one’s photographic instincts: To see the photograph, to take it, and to then know that what was there to be taken has in fact been taken. But doubt interjects, knowing that while what might have been taken has been taken, what was seen could have been seen in a different way. Trust is centered on the realization that one is a good photographer. But there is the doubt, the constant asking whether one might not become a better photographer. (more)
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If someone asked you what photography’s big deal was, all you’d have to say is that it has something to do with “the gaze,” and then show this photograph. Of course, photography is not just this image. There is a lot more - or, if you’re a curmudgeon (there seem to be many these days) a lot less. But there is a lot to be said for talking about the most outstanding examples of any art form to get an idea of their power - instead of focusing on the detritus. Thus, when talking about photography we’d probably want to talk about photographs of the human form, and out of all those we might want to talk about this particular photograph. Its title is “A woman sits for a final photograph with her dying mother,” and it was taken by Eduard Méhomé (the photograph can be found on page 41 of Life & Afterlife in Benin - make sure to view the slightly larger version of this photograph first by clicking on the icon on the side before reading the rest of this article). (more)
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As a photographer, you won’t get around bringing your desire to photography, just as a viewer you do the same thing. You have no choice. As I have argued before, photography must fail if that desire is denied. But desire does not automatically create good photography. An equally crucial factor is trust. As a photographer, you have to trust your photographs. You have to trust that they say what you want them to say. Or more accurately, you have to realize that your subconscious mind is bringing more things to photography than your conscious mind might realize. (more)
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At the core of all photography lies desire, our longing to connect, not to forget, to express love, to reach out to someone else (even if it is just our future selves) and say “Here, look at this! I want you to see this!” (more)
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A recent work related trip took me to San Francisco, where I saw an installation of Jim Goldberg’s Raised by Wolves at Pier 24. Earlier this year, I had already come across an installation that was part of the Deutsche Börse exhibition in Berlin. I had one big impression that I took away from these two exhibitions. Here is a photographer who is really struggling with the medium photography, trying to make it tell the story he wants to tell. To make this clear, by “struggling” I mean a very creative struggle. Maybe “wrestling” would be a better word (if a grown man could wrestle with an abstract concept): Trying to make the medium express something, by bending and twisting and augmenting it. (more)
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The latest auction record for a photograph was set by Andreas Gursky’s Rhein II1. Gursky is no stranger to being in this position. Previously, he held the record for a while with 99 Cents2 - photography, one could argue, that was surely worth more than the value given in its title. Several million dollars felt a bit like a stretch. But it was and still is magnificent photography, the artist’s signature achievement. (more)
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Still in his mid-twenties, Matt Eich has an impressive list of achievements under his belt already. I had a general sense of curiosity about his work, and I figured the best way to learn more about it - and the person behind the camera - was to ask some questions. Find our conversation below. (more)
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Yaakov Israel’s The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey, complex, multi-faceted project, featuring portraits and landscapes, was my personal pick as a winner of this year’s Conscientious Portfolio Competition. For me, the project captures seemingly disjointed moments in time, offering many hints and as many red herrings. The viewer is invited to come back and re-look at these photographs, to find a slightly different world each time. New details reveal themselves, while old details change their meaning ever so slightly. Instead of pointing at something and saying “This is the way it is” the photographs ask their viewers to discover what is to be found and to ultimately come to their own conclusions. Find my conversation with the photographer about his work below. (more)
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Mirjana Vrbaski’s Verses of Emptiness was picked by Caroline von Courten as one of the winners of this year’s Conscientious Portfolio Competition. About the work, Caroline writes “These very simple and yet dense complex photographs invite me to look more closely and to have a conversation in my mind with these photographs and the persons portrayed.” and “Here the limitation and the concentration of the photographic medium reveal themselves at once in an extraordinary way.” I talked with Mirjana about her work in a conversation that you can find below. (more)
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Nigel Bennet’s Silence Has an Echo was picked by Michael Mazzeo as one of the winning entries to this year’s Conscientious Portfolio Competition. Michael wrote: “This portfolio offers enough information and ambiguity to elicit countless narratives. Nevertheless, the mood of the work is certainly unsettling and, I believe, very appropriate given the current state of the world.” I talked with Nigel about the series in an extended conversation that you can find below. (more)
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I remember then when I saw portraits from “Mona Lisas of the suburbs” by Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler for the first time, I was blown away. Seemingly very simple photographs, the portraits reveal enormous depth, while at the same time they are incredibly beautiful. To make a long story short, there had been some plans to make a book, so after some discussions Ute and Werner decided to do it with Meier & Müller, the photobook publishing venture I’m part of. The book is now out (in Europe, US copies are in transit), so I asked the photographers some questions about this very special project - their first together, as a married couple, after each being a photographer for almost forty years. (more)
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I have long been thinking about the art of the remix and about seeing it applied to photography. I have also long been griping about photobooks, about edits or sequences, occasionally done badly, but often just done in ways that I think could be done differently. Not better, just differently. Thing is, even though we’re living in a culture that has long embraced the remix in many different ways, the world of contemporary fine-art photography has proven to be solidly conservative. Maybe there is a good reason for that. Maybe I’m just too attached to a silly idea. Maybe not. (more)
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“I had heard about the mummies of Guanajuato in Mexico, mummified cholera victims from the 1830’s.” writes Steve Pyke. “The reason for the condition of the corpses was said to be minerals found in the soil locally. The bodies were of men, women and young children, including one stillborn foetus. I had seen photographs but wasn’t prepared for the initial encounter… Walking into the small dark museum I saw rows of glass specimen cases containing atrophied yet completely mummified figures. Some were arched over as if in death throes, whilst others seemed at peace and holding books. Others I saw were standing as if soldiers on sentry duty. There was the faint, musty smell of mothballs in the room. It felt like a church in there, but with a frozen congregation. I felt a hushed reverence to these figures. I’m sure they would have been recognisable if I had been able to see photographs of what they looked like when alive, but when these people died photography was only just being invented.” (more)
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Benjamin Lowy’s new book Iraq | Perspectives is due to be released later this year. Given photojournalism has been in the news (again) recently, I approached Ben to talk about his book, his work in general, and about photojournalism. (more)
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Ever since writing about at what stage some photograph might be too similar to some other photograph (also see this follow-up), I have been thinking about how to approach the topic in a more productive manner. In part, this is for slightly selfish reasons: I’m a bit tired of these kinds of debates (“Did photographer X rip off photographer Y?”), and I’d love to have a better answer when asked. So I thought a good approach might be to start from the idea and not from the images. (more)
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I don’t remember where or how I came across Alia Malley’s 2009/10 Southland, but I do remember the photography stayed with me for a while. There was something about those landscapes that struck me. Recently, someone pointed me to Alia’s new series A Cavalier in Sight of a Village, for which she was (in fact at the time of this writing is) raising money on Kickstarter. So I got in touch with Alia and asked her whether she’d answer my questions about her work. (more)
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Is there anything that has not been said about the analog-vs.-digital debate? With every passing day, the debate looks slightly sillier, as digital photography is firmly replacing analog photography. Just the other day there was another report about plummeting film sales. Those numbers are dominated by “amateurs” - people who take their snapshots now with their cell phones or digital point-and-shoot cameras. But of course, there are many who still shoot film (incl. me) and will continue to do so (at least as long as it’s possible). Analog photography is here to stay in the realm of fine-art photography. So what’s left to talk about? (more)
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OK, I’ll admit it: That’s not the actual question from What’s Next? The actual question is “Why do my students think that working with analogue techniques is more ‘real’ than with digital ones?” I took the liberty to re-phrase the question because I think there is an underlying, more general issue here. If I’m correct, dealing with the (slightly) larger issue will also answer the original question. (more)
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A few weeks ago, I had a bunch of discussions with various people - including a group of students at MassArt - about photojournalism. Inevitably, the various problems (or “problems”) were brought up, and at some stage someone asked why any of that mattered. It’s a good question. But I think there is a good answer. Unlike pure art photography (whatever that might be), photojournalism is more than “just” photography. We use it to get informed. At the time of the discussions, unrest in Libya had erupted into what started to look like a civil war, and several NATO countries were urging the rest to get involved. Were we going to be in favour of that or not? At the time, news from Libya filled the news, and a large fraction of the news consisted of photographs taken by photojournalists. There now is a new pitch up on emphas.is by Michael Christopher Brown, entitled The Libyan Republic - if you want to support a photojournalist specifically working in the country, which still torn by war, check it out. (more)
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Aperture has long been a - maybe the - beacon of American photobook publishing. It’s pretty much impossible to talk about photobooks without at some stage running into a book that was done by Aperture. Lesley Martin, Publisher of the Aperture Book Program, has worked on a huge number of those books, often pushing the envelope in unexpected directions. A few weeks ago, I sat down with Lesley to talk about Aperture and about the history and future of photobooks. (more)
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After a short break, it’s round 6 of my ongoing series of conversations with Michael Itkoff, this time about art fairs and art bubbles. (more)
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“Rape is horrifyingly widespread in conflicts all around the world,” writes The Economist, with a focus on Congo. Besieged is a collaborative project by photographers Ying Ang, Agnes Dherbeys, Sarah Elliott, and Benedicte Kurzen, intended to put a spotlight onto this situation. (more)
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One of the first projects featured on newly launched emphas.is is Aaron Huey’s Pine Ridge Billboard Project. Find Aaron’s pitch below. (more)
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The work of Nadav Kander has always fascinated me. My curiosity only grew when seeing Obama’s People and later working on the review of Yangtze, The Long River. I finally approached Nadav and asked him whether he had a moment to talk about his work. I’m grateful he did. Find our conversation below. (more)
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If one wants to think of photobook making as a spectrum, at one end, there are commercial publishers. At the other end, there are artists literally making their own books: Printing the pages, binding them etc. Raymond Meeks has produced a variety of such artist books, and I approached him to talk about those. (more)
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Designer Hans Gremmen is actively involved in creating some of the most cutting-edge Dutch photobooks. I wanted to find out what it is they put into the water that makes those books so different, so I approached him to ask him a few questions about photobook making in The Netherlands. (more)
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Late last year, I had the opportunity to teach a class on the contemporary photobook with Alice Rose George, as part of the Hartford Art School Photography MFA Program. Even outside the classroom, Alice and I spent a lot of time talking about photobooks, where things were, where they are now, and where they’re going. As an independent photography editor and curator, who has worked extensively with private and corporate collections, book publishers and magazines, Alice’s knowledge of the photobook publishing world is almost limitless. Among the publications she worked on/was involved in are Hope Photographs, 25 and Under (whose exhibition she also curated), Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled, Adam Bartos’ Yard Sale Photographs and many more. As one of the four founders of Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs (see the book), she has helped to create one of the most remarkable tributes to the people and events of September 11, 2001. Alice also served as the Director of Magnum New York and the Publisher of Granta in England. The following is a conversation I had with her about Here Is New York, photobooks in general, and ebooks. (more)
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If you happen to come across a photobook showing you images of chicken filets and images from furniture ads, it’s like you’re looking at one of Erik Kessels’ products. Apart from owning and operating an ad agency (make sure to reload that site several times) and various other activities, Erik runs KesselsKramer Publishing, which is responsible for gems such as the In Almost Every Picture or Useful Photography series. To find out more about the ideas behind the work, I sat down with Erik on a sunny late-November morning in Amsterdam to ask some questions. (more)
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This is the first conversation in a new series focusing on photobooks and their makers. I’m talking with photographers Richard Renaldi and Seth Boyd of Charles Lane Press about what photobooks mean to them and about their experiences with their publishing company. (more)
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It is one of those coincidences that around the time I published my posts about German photography right after the war (part 1, part 2), I came across the work of Helena Schätzle, The time in between. Of course, I was curious to learn more about it, so I approached Helena and asked her whether she would be willing to talk about the work. Find the conversation below. (more)
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Oksana Yushko is one of the winners of this year’s Conscientious Portfolio Competition. About her work, juror Susanna Brown wrote: “Oksana Yushko’s project Kenozero Dreams reveals both the beauty and banality of life for the inhabitants of Kenozero in Nothern Russia. We glimpse a place that has remained relatively unchanged for decades and an atmosphere of longing, of waiting. The landscape and portrait images are equally evocative, but for me the most memorable photograph in this series depicts two teenagers in a field, collecting flowers in the twilight haze. Dressed in modern clothes they carry out an ancient pagan rite. The boy’s gaze is transfixed, balancing a delicate wreath of flowers on his baseball cap he stares into the gloaming, and perhaps into his own future.” In the following conversation, I talk with Oksana about her work. (more)
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A little while ago, Benjamin of duckrabbit fame sent me an email, telling me about Ivor Prickett and his story about Abkhazia. I like Ivor’s work very much, and since there currently is so much talk about how photojournalism is presumably dead (or maybe not) and about the relationship between photojournalism, documentary photography and what we call “fine art” photography (for a lack of a better term), I approached him to talk about his work. (more)
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I’m just back from visiting the New York Art Book Fair, and I’ve been thinking about what I like about photobooks so much. Individual books might appeal to me for particular reasons, but as a whole, as a species, photobooks have become incredibly dear to me. Why do I spend so much time looking at them, thinking about them, even making them (Meier & Müller’s forthcoming books are currently being conceived)? (more)
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A few days ago, my wife and I went to look for a dresser at a nearby shop that we had never been to. I will admit that shopping for furniture probably is not very high on the list of things I enjoy doing. But that is not the reason why it took me considerable time to actually enter the store once we had arrived. In the little room one had to walk through to get into the main showroom there were a couple of baskets filled with old postcards and photographs. In fact the whole store was selling more than just furniture. Of course, I had to leaf through the entire collection of postcards and photographs, to see whether there was something of interest. There was. (more)
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Lydia McCarthy is one of the winners of this year’s Conscientious Portfolio Competition. About her work, juror Elisabeth Biondi wrote: “In the course of a week, a month, a year I view many many photographs & much of it good photography. I always keep my eyes peeled for a surprise, either in content or style. Portraiture is an important part of my work, or better the work that I assign. It therefore is important in what visually I pursue. These portraits are different from anything I have seen before. They are impressionistic in a contemporary way. Looking at them puts me in a reflective tender frame of mind. Perhaps this is so because we always are looking for picture that might work for the fiction we publish. We try to pair pictures to words that express a mood rather than edge features into the reader’s mind. We want to let the mind wander. This is why I like these pictures.” In this following conversation, I talked with Lydia about her work. (more)
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Dalton Rooney is one of the winners of this year’s Conscientious Portfolio Competition. As I wrote earlier, what struck me about Outer Lands is how engaging these landscapes are if you spend time with them. Seemingly simple, they are deeper than they seem; seemingly messy, with their tangle of branches, they are clear and beautiful. They offer space for contemplation, without pushing an obvious message. Outer Lands shows the contemporary landscape - with various human traces - photographed most beautifully in a contemporary way. In the following, I am talking with Dalton about his work. (more)
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By now you’ve probably seen Richard Mosse’s Infra, photography of what we tend to casually refer to as the conflict in Congo. Why was he using those strange colours? I asked him. (more)
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Earlier this Summer, I was teaching two classes on the history of the photobook. The second week, class was moved outside a couple of times for a more informal gathering. On one such occasion, I noticed that my mouth opened, and I heard myself state that Kikuji Kawada’s The Map (Chizu) surely was the best photobook ever made. That made no sense to me! It is not that I don’t like The Map (Chizu). But the claim that one thing - whatever it might be - is the best such thing ever made truly doesn’t make much sense, at last for me (if you don’t belive me, try one of those “world’s best coffee” places in New York City - that’ll teach you!). Not surprisingly, the part of my brain that was not involved in the talking felt a bit as if my utterance had in fact come out of the part of my body I was sitting on. Needless to say, in a class that covered 150 years of photobook history you can’t easily get away with claims about “the best photobook ever made”. So when pressed, I elaborated on why The Map truly is a stellar book. Just as before, I was surprised about the stuff I heard myself say, and pleasantly so, if I may add. Son of a gun, I thought, that’s actually kind of interesting. (more)
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Remember cassette tapes? Those little plastic shells that protected the two spools? You would usually buy blank ones and produce your own tape, recording from the radio, say, or compiling music from records. I used to love cassette tapes. In fact, I still do. (more)
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The occasion of the upcoming release of an Aperture book by Trevor Paglen (Invisible) seemed like the perfect opportunity to talk with the artist about his work. (more)
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You’re a photographer, and you want to do it right. The big question, of course, is: What exactly does it mean to do things “right” in this digital day and age? The photography aside, there are a lot of other aspects to photography, and most of them have to do with, well, business, or at least with trying to reach other people, to entice them to look at your work. How do you do that? There’s an industry of people who specialize in telling photographers how to do that, and I have no intention of joining them. However, the longer I’m following what seems to be going on right now, the more of a tingly feeling I am getting in the fingers I typically use for typing. In particular, I really want to write a few words about what people call “social networking.” Of course, I’ll happily admit that I’m no more of an expert on this particular topic than most other people, so you’ll have to take that into account. (more)
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Shortly after discovering Dawin Meckel’s portrait of Detroit, I approached him to find out more about this body of work: How did he go about photographing Detroit? How did this body of work get made? (more)
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Dhruv Malhotra was one of the photographer at the 2010 Hyères Festival of Fashion and Photography. He was picked as the recipient of a scholarship for SVA’s Photo Global program, so he’ll have a chance to come to New York and work there. I approached Dhruv to talk about his own work and a little bit about photography in India in general. (more)
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Round four of the ping-pong chats with Daylight Magazine’s Michael Itkoff centers on individual images, the impressions they leave, their power, and their uses, in the context of the (at the date of this writing) ongoing Gulf oil spill.
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The other day, I had one of those email exchanges about artist statements with a friend. I’m writing “one of those,” because almost inevitably they gravitate towards the same kinds of sentiments. My friend’s comments about them were (I’m paraphrasing): “most” tend to be “unreadable” and don’t help the work (I am very generous rephrasing here), are they really needed and why does one have to write one?, and many are boring. I suppose it might be time to talk about it: How do you write a statement and why? Of course, it is much easier - and usually more fun - to explain how not to write an artist statement, especially if an especially egregious example is at hand. But that doesn’t help much if you have to write one. When you Google “how to write an artist statement” you get a lot of different results, so I figured I’d simply add my own perspective to the mix, hoping that some people might find it useful. (more)
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Indre Serpytyte is one of the photographers featured at the 2010 Hyères Festival of Fashion and Photography. There, I had a longer conversation with her about her work and its background. The following conversation, conducted after coming back, touches upon many aspects of Indre’s photography. (more)
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Matthieu Lavanchy is one of the two winners of this year’s Hyères Photography Festival. In this conversation, Matthieu and I talk about the background of his work.
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Round three of the ping-pong chats with Daylight Magazine’s Michael Itkoff centers on what comes - or might come - out of the impact of technology, the web and the Great Recession on photography. (more; image courtesy Douglas Ljungkvist)
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Yann Gross is one of the two winners of this year’s Hyères Photography Festival. In this conversation, Yann and I talk about the background of his work.
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After I linked to Dalia Khamissy’s work earlier this year, she emailed me, and we ended up talking about her work. Its background intrigued me, and I asked her whether I could interest her in doing an interview for the blog. (more)
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A little while ago, I asked an assorted group of photographers and gallerists What Makes A Great Portrait? It’s one of those questions where it’s fairly straightforward to point to a portrait and say “Now this is a great portrait!” - but explaining what it actually is that makes the portrait great is quite a different story. I am infinitely fascinated by portraiture, and I decided to continue my little quest, trying to find out what made some portraits great, so I asked a different group of people the same question: “What makes a good portrait? Could you provide us with an example of a portrait that you really like - either from your or someone else’s work - and say why the portrait works so well for you?” Here is what I got back. (more; image above taken by Paul Stuart)
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As you can see, I plagiarized myself. Or did I? I had the brilliant idea of taking a photo of one of my own photographs on the screen of my laptop, to make a statement about how photography is disseminated these days, how we view photographs mostly on screens. The photographer in me has been placated by the idea that one of his photographs is getting some exposure that it probably wouldn’t get otherwise. The art critic in me finds the concept behind that photo a bit flimsy - but then, so is Richard Prince’s behind his rephotographing of cigarette ad photography, and look where that got him. The art critic does like that extra glow in the image (that’s the ceiling lamp), though. (more)
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In a new installment of my ongoing series of “ping-pong chats” with Michael Itkoff, we’re talking about whether or how photography can initiate change, and the role multimedia might play.
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I had “known” Michael Itkoff, one of the editors of Daylight Magazine, for a while, having exchanged a few emails. We met in person and got to know each other at this year’s Fotofest in Houston, and we decided to collaborate to produce contents together. After a bit of brain-storming, we came up with “ping-pong chatting” - an online conversation. We decided to talk about the Fotofest portfolio reviews, and things took off from there. It’s a bit of an experiment, and we’re both very happy with it.
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Massimo Vitali is one of the photographer who had been on top of my list to talk to for a while. I finally approached Massimo, and much to my delight he found the time to have a conversation about his work and his influences.
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Images are in the news - not just literally, but also as a topic themselves. In a day and age where image manipulation has become very simple to do, hardly a day goes by without yet another “scandal” about some manipulated image somewhere. As I indicated on this site before, I think without a proper understanding how images work, this situation will not change. Introducing very unspecific - if not unrealistic - rules about the amount of manipulation that is acceptable totally misses the source of the problem. When Michael Schäfer sent me the link to his new work, I thought talking with him about his images and what they mean might be a good idea. Of course, here we have an artist, not a news photographer; but I see a lot of his work as a good way to start investigating how images work and how they are being used. (more)
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The Houston Center for Photography (HCP) is currently showing RE: groups - American Photographs Before 1950, selected from W.M. Hunt´s Collection Blind Pirate. HCP approached me about doing an interview with Bill for the current edition of SPOT Magazine, and of course I was thrilled about the idea. The outline was to produce “a 1,000 word dialogue on the subject,” and at the end of the day, we only overshot the target by 500%. The current edition of SPOT Magazine contains an abridged version of the conversation, here is the full piece. Click on the images on the side to see larger versions. (more)
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Having spent a lot of time with Mark Steinmetz’s books South East and Greater Atlanta, I was curious about the history and photographer behind the work. So I asked Mark for an interview, and much to my delight he agreed to it.
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Lydia Panas’ portraits, which typically contain at least two, if not more people, possess that little something that lifts them above a lot of other portraiture and that at the same time is so undefinable, so indescribable. In Lydia’s case, the magic seems to be coming from the interaction between the subjects. Group portraits often contain an element of heroism - this alone would be a good topic for a longer discussion (see an example here) - and that heroism is absent in Lydia’s work. Instead, there are trust and displays of intimacy.
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Photographically, the continent of Africa, home of around one billion people and cradle of humanity, seems to be in a bit of a tight spot. While there is a lot of different work being produced about or in Africa, the most visible types of photography, the ones we get to see most often, are either photojournalistic depictions of war and/or poverty or what Jim Johnson called the freak show. David Wright’s Alebtong, Uganda was thus a very pleasant surprise for me: A young photographer going to Africa and producing images that do not center on photojournalistic clichés or on the overly exotic.
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After publishing my review of Christopher Anderson’s Capitolio, I ended up exchanging emails with him about the work and its purpose and reception. Things got so interesting that I thought this would be a great opportunity to take things public and to have a conversation with him on this blog. Thankfully, Chris agreed. Note that larger versions of all images (all of them, of course, are copyright Christopher Anderson) can be seen by clicking on them. The b/w images are from the book, and they are presented just like in the book (see the conversation for details).
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Bradley Peters is one of the winners of this year’s Conscientious Portfolio Competition. A recent graduate from Yale, his work marries what might be thought of as the currently dominant Yale aesthetic (which often involves staging photography) with the flash-heavy, completely spontaneous kind of photography that has been very popular in Britain. Ultimately, such a simplifying description really doesn’t do anyone a big favour, but it might serve well to come up with a first, crude description of the work - and knowing what I know now after having done the conversation with Bradley it’s not even that far off!
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The Fall 2009 edition of FOAM International Photography Magazine is dedicated to showcasing the work of up-and-coming photographers. This year, there are 18 photographers - a very diverse group. FOAM approached me earlier this year to ask whether I was available to conduct interviews with each the photographers, and, of course, I agreed to it. The following conversation with Aaron Schuman is the full version of the abridged one printed in FOAM 20.
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Dana Popa’s “not Natasha” portrays young women for poor Eastern European countries who spent years in other, richer European nations as forced prostitutes. The numbers alone are sobering for a continent that likes to lecture others about human rights (see, for example, this story or this one). But it’s not just a European problem (see, for example, this story). I wanted to talk Dana about what made her work on the project and I wanted to learn more about her experience, so I approached her for an interview. Click on any of the photos to see slightly larger versions.
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Vanessa Winship’s work came to my attention when a friend of mine showed me the copy of Sweet Nothings, a most exquisite little book of portraiture of school children in Eastern Anatolia (Turkey). A little later, Vanessa sent me a copy of the book, and we started talking about her work, so I ended up asking her for an interview. Click on the images below to see slightly larger versions.
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The Fall 2009 edition of FOAM International Photography Magazine is dedicated to showcasing the work of up-and-coming photographers. This year, there are 18 photographers - a very diverse group. FOAM approached me earlier this year to ask whether I was available to conduct interviews with each the photographers, and, of course, I agreed to it. The following conversation with Michael Lundgren is the full version of the abridged one printed in FOAM 20.
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Will Steacy’s current project is called “Down These Mean Streets”, and to take the photos, he hiked from the airport to the central business district of the cities he was photographing - at night, equipped with a large-format camera. This is not something photographers do all the time - so I approached Will to find out more about his work.
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(Homeless series, London 1987) Steve Pyke’s work is the first that made me really think about portraiture - what it does, how it works. Last year, I was invited to join a panel on portraiture, and I was extremely excited about meeting him (he was one of the other panelists) and hearing him talk about his work. I used the opportunity to ask him whether he would be available for a conversation, and much to my delight he agreed to it.
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Mikhael Subotzky is one of Magnum’s youngest and newest members, and his first book Beaufort West was one of my favourite photography books last year. I got interested in talking to Mikhael after seeing the book and reading a comment he had left on Magnum’s blog, under a post about photojournalism.
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Joshua Lutz just had Meadowlands published, after spending ten years on the project. His book (and recent show) had me curious about the background of the project, and I approached Joshua to talk about it.
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I have long been an admirer of Carla van de Puttelaar’s photography, which, I think, is not that well known outside of Europe. Carla just had her new book “The Beholder’s Eye” published (available via Idea Books). Given I had been thinking a lot about nudity and/in portraiture for my show “Bare”, I approached Carla and asked her whether she would be willing to talk about her work. Please note the following images are NSFW.
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Phil Toledano is one of those photographers where it’s impossible to predict what he’ll come up with next. The first to portray video gamers, he has since covered a large variety of topics, such as his most recent America - The Gift Shop (which is really an art installation), the very personal and moving Days With My Father, or the just released Phone Sex. I was curious to learn more about how Phil does all that, so I decided to simply ask.
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I have been thinking about book publishing a lot these past few months, and when I looked through Rob Hornstra’s website I found not only a lot of very interesting photography but also a whole set of self-published books, most of them sold out. I got in touch with Rob and he agreed to sharing some of his “secrets”.
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When my friend Richard Renaldi showed me the first images from the new series Touching Strangers I was just amazed. Asking two complete strangers to not only pose with each other, but to also touch each other while doing that… And this in a culture whose discomfort with touching someone you don’t know, or touching something that someone else might have touched still baffles me, even after having spent almost ten years in it!
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Paul Schiek is the mastermind behind TBW Books. You might not have heard of TBW Books - but I think you might really appreciate what Paul does with it: “Four accomplished artists working in the photographic medium were invited to present an intensely personal and poetic exploration of their work to be released in the form of a book. Each artist will be represented by one book in this four book series. Given complete creative control, these gifted individuals crafted powerful, surprising, and completely uncompromised works that implore the viewer to contemplate the relationships between images. […] The Subscription Series is a limited edition, hand numbered book series that will not be available in stores. Subscribers will receive one book every three months beginning December 1st [2008]. Book quantities are limited to 650 unsigned subscriptions and 50 signed subscriptions.” I talked to Paul about the ideas behind all of this.
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Andreas Gefeller is a German photographer well known for his series Supervisions, which pushes the boundaries of photography by elevating the view point off the ground. I have been extremely interested in Andreas’ work for a long time, and I recently had the chance to talk to him about it.
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If further proof was needed that it’s not the tools that produce art, but the vision of the artist, Curtis Mann’s work would provide a good example. I had long wanted to talk to him about his work, and I finally got the chance to do so.
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When I received a review copy of Peter Granser’s Signs in the mail, I had quite a few questions about the work. And since I had always admired his earlier work about Alzheimer patients, I asked Peter whether he would be up for a conversation.
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Charles Fréger works in series of portraits and is the mastermind behind a pan-European network of photographers - which provided ample reasons for me to approach him and ask for an interview. He was more than happy to share his thoughts about photography and about how to work together as a group of artists.
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Portraiture might be the most challenging photographic endeavor. It is a complex interaction between the photographer’s intent, the subject’s preconceptions and ideas, and the viewer’s background. So how do photographers manage to make great portraits? I have long been a fan of Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene. Her portraits of adolescents possess an extremely quiet and forceful beauty. I’ve often wondered how she manages to create work that is so beautiful, while always avoiding the trap of producing mere clichés. Deciding to approach Hellen to talk to her about her images, I was particularly happy to not only get a glimpse of her ideas about her work, but to also to see some of her very new photos that have not yet been seen publicly.
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Miguel Rio Branco was a freelance photographer and director of photography for movies when he embarked on documentary photography and was soon noticed for the dramatic quality of his color work. In 1980, he became an associate with Magnum Photos.” I talked to Miguel about his work for Magnum’s blog. (note that some of the images are not safe for work)
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Bert Teunissen’s Domestic Landscapes is one of my favourite photography books, and I had wanted to talk to Bert about his work for a while. A little while ago, I finally sent him an email to ask, and he agreed to an interview.
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Joakim Eskildsen has just had “The Roma Journeys” published (see my review here), the culmination of years of photographic work. I was very interested in talking to Joakim about the project, and he kindly agreed to share his experience.
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Thomas Ruff is one of the most well-known and influential German photographers alive, pupil of the Bechers and then teacher at the art academy in Düsseldorf. I have always been extremely impressed by his willingness to extend the boundaries of photography to see where things might be going. Late last year, I met him at the opening of his last show at Zwirner gallery, and of course I had to ask him whether he would be available for an interview. Much to my delight he was. (NB: For those working in an office environment, one of the images below is definitely not safe for work)
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The other day, I had the chance to visit Jerry Spagnoli’s studio and to talk to him about his work, and afterwards I asked him whether he would be available for a conversation, to be published on this blog. I’m very glad he agreed to it.
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Cara Phillips is in the process of creating a body of work on the extreme end of the beauty industry, whose work usually is invisible: The plastic/cosmetic surgery business. Since I have always been quite baffled by the general acceptance of beauty ideals that only a tiny fraction of the population can easily conform to, I asked Cara whether she’d be willing to tell me a little bit about her work and about what’s behind it, and I’m glad she agreed to it.
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Olaf Otto Becker is one of my favourite landscape photographers. Given his new book Broken Line has just been released, I asked Olaf whether he would be up for a conversation, and I was very excited when he agreed to one.
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It is no secret that I am particularly interested in portraiture, and a photographer who lately caught my attention is Rachael Dunville. I asked her whether she would be available for a conversation, and I was happy to learn that she was.
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SGT Jason Thompson waits for a nurse to clean his face of blood and grime after he was wounded along with two of his soldiers when an IED hit their vehicle. All three soldiers were returned to duty. Peter van Agtmael “studied history at Yale University. After graduation, he went to China on a fellowship to photograph the areas of the Yangtze River being inundated by the Three Gorges Dam. Peter lived in South Africa in 2005, and worked extensively throughout sub-Saharan Africa. He is currently working on a long-term project about the toll of America’s wars, at home and abroad. In 2006, Peter was named one of “25 under 25 - Up and Coming American Photographers” by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. And in 2007, he came second in the General News Stories category at the World Press Photo awards for his coverage of night raids in Iraq.” (source) Peter emailed me after I had commented on an Iraq war photo, and after we started talking, I asked him whether he’d be up for a conversation. I’m very glad he agreed to it.
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As I recently indicated, discussions about German photography are usually very narrowly focused on a single aesthetic (“deadpan”) and on a small group of photographers. In order to change this a little bit, I decided to approach German photographers to talk to them about photography. Kai-Olaf Hesse emailed me after I ranted about the somewhat bewildering lack of German participation in the photography blog scene, and I asked him whether he’d be up for a conversation about German photography (held in English btw) or, as we will see, “German photography”. I’m very happy he agreed to it, and I am very grateful for all the work he put into it. It’s a long read, but a real treat.
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Over the course of his career, Adam Bartos has covered a wide range of topics and locations (incl. the UN and the Soviet/Russian space program). I am happy he gave me the opportunity to talk about these projects and about his approach to photography.
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Throughout his career as a photographer, Robert Lyons has covered a wide variety of subject matters, and he has been teaching photography in Berlin for a while. When I moved to Northampton he got in touch with me, since he just re-located back to Western Massachusetts himself (that’s the commute to Berlin!). Given his background and his exposure to both the US and the German photography scene, of course I had to ask him whether he’d be up for a conversation for the blog, and I’m very glad he agreed to it.
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Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places is one of my all-time favourite photography books, and I don’t think it’s an easy task to grasp contemporary photography without having seen those photo. Given his background as one of the driving forces behind the colour revolution of the 1970s and as an educator, I asked Stephen whether he would be willing to have a conversation about what is shaping contemporary photography now, and I was very happy when he agreed to do so (don’t miss the extra treat at the very end of the conversation!).
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Over the course of his career, Mitch Epstein has covered diverse topics such as Vietnam, his father and the demise of the family furniture store, or - most recently - America’s cultural investment in energy. I am very glad I had the opportunity to speak with him about his work.
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Bruce Haley and I have been talking via email occasionally about various issues that I had mentioned on the blog. At some stage, I wondered why I simply didn’t ask him whether he’d be up for one of my conversations, and much to my delight he agreed. The following conversation touches upon many different aspects of photojournalism and the kind of fine-art photography that one could call “documentary”, but I do have to warn about the very graphic and shocking nature of one of the photographs. Given that the photos from that series are being discussed in detail in the conversation, I decided against not showing it.
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When Simon Roberts sent me a copy of his new book Motherland, I thought that instead of writing a review I could talk to him about the book. I am glad he agreed to participate.
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When I first saw Andrew Miksys’ Baxt I realized I was dealing with something a bit different. Let’s face it: Most people only know the Roma (“gypsies”) as a comedic backdrop from the movie Borat, and there still exist considerable stereotypes (and worse) about them. So I asked Andrew whether he would be up for a conversation about his work.
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Todd Hido might be mostly known for his eerie night-time scenes of anonymous suburban settings, but has also done portraits. In fact, he is one of the photographers whose work will be shown in A New American Portrait. I talked with Todd about his work, and about how to shoot a great portrait.
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I had been aware of several of Misty Keasler’s projects, but it took me a while to connect them with the same name. Misty has covered topics ranging from people living in huge garbage dumps to Japanese love hotels, and I was curious how she managed to do this so (seemingly) effortlessly - so I asked her.
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As a Magnum and Newsweek photographer, Luc Delahaye covered many of the most recent areas of conflict like, for example, Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan. Apart from other prizes, he won the World Press Photo three times. With time, his work evolved from standard photojournalistic practice, both towards other areas (for example, for his project “L’Autre” he stealthily took photos of Parisian subway passengers) and methods (he started to use a panoramic large-format camera for photojournalistic assignments). “History” might be considered the culmination of this development, a series of panoramic photos often showing vast scales, such as the whole UN assembly hall while President Bush was giving a speech, and printed quite large (4 by 8 feet). Most famously, his photo of a dead Taliban soldier, exhibited and sold by a commercial art gallery, caused a stir a few years ago. A year later, he resigned from Magnum. I talked to Luc about his earlier and current work.
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Apart from being an accomplished photographer, Martin Parr has been active as a book editor (for example, Boring Postcards or The Photobook: A History) and curator. This Summer, “Colour before colour - 1970’s European Color Photography” will be on view at Hasted Hunt gallery, curated by Martin and showcasing six not very widely known early European colour pioneers. I talked to him about the show.
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A photo by Roger Ballen is not something that you look at and then forget. His photography possesses a very intense beauty. I was recently given the opportunity to speak with Roger about his work and its background.
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After I found an article about blogs in a German photography magazine, I contacted its author, photographer Peter Bialobrzeski, to ask a couple questions about the German scene - and from there, it was almost a logical step to ask him for an interview. I was/am very happy about his willingness to participate, especially since there has been a lot of talk about German photography on this blog. So is bigger better? Is there a uniquely German style of photography? Let’s find out!
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Jeff Brouws’ book Approaching Nowhere had long been on my list of books to buy, and I finally bought it. It’s a fascinating book, not just for the photography alone. There are essays at the end of the book about what is depicted, and I contacted Jeff to ask him whether he would be willing to talk about his work.
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Andrew Moore’s Russia is quite an impressive book (see my review). When I asked Andrew whether he would be willing to talk about it, much to my delight he agreed immediately.
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I have long been fascinated by the photography of David Maisel. Often, when people who don’t know much about fine-art photography joke around about what they think it is (can you guess?), I show them David’s website. Once they’re hooked to the beauty of the images, I tell them what they’re really looking at, and that never fails to work. However, I have always felt a little bit uncomfortable about admiring beautiful images of things that are quite disastrous, so I asked David whether he would talk about this with me.
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When I looked at Sarah Martin’s photography and at her statements, which provide the background, a whole set of questions popped up in my head, and I asked Sarah whether she was willing to talk about her work. I was thrilled to learn that she was.
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A while ago, Timothy Archibald’s book Sex Machines was released (see my review here), and since then I had been quite curious about how the book had been perceived and what Timothy’s experiences might have been. At the end of last year, Timothy wrote me a end-of-the-year email, and since he hinted at some unforeseen developments (I’m just going to call it that lest I spoil the following) I could not contain my curiosity any longer and asked him whether he was willing to talk about the project. I’m very glad to learn that he was.
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Richard Renaldi’s Figure and Ground is one of my favourite photo books from this year. I immediately hoped to be able to talk to Richard about his work, and I was very excited when he agreed to do so.
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Paul Shambroom’s portfolio contains a series of projects that, on the surface, seem disconnected. But there is an underlying common theme. I talked with Paul about the connections and about the individual projects.
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Blogs are not a new phenomenon. But I think in the photo world they have really only taken off this year, with a remarkably large number of new blogs appearing (if I tried to provide a list it would end up being incomplete). What is interesting is that more and more established photographers now have a blog presence. Alec Soth’s (relatively) new blog might have made the biggest splash recently, and since Alec and I have been talking about aspect of blogging occasionally, I thought we might as well talk about blogs and their impact in public.
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I’ve always found Todd Deutsch’s work quite intriguing, especially his series Family Days. For a large variety of reasons I personally would never be able to produce a body of work like that; and I finally asked Todd whether he’d be willing to talk about his work and some of the background. I’m very glad he agreed to participate.
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There are few things that are subtle in Juliana Beasley’s photography. But then, the fact that you don’t get to see stuff like that too often in our somewhat sanitized culture doesn’t mean that you’re looking at the fringes (as much as many people would like to believe that). I talked with Juliana about her work.
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Amy Elkins is a young photographer whose portraits I quite like. Given my ongoing quest to ask photographers about their portraits I asked Amy whether she’d want to talk about them, and I’m glad that she agreed to do it.
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Just a little while ago, Chris Jordan’s book In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster was published. The book contains images taken in the area devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and given the contents of Chris’ earlier work I asked him for an interview.
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After reading Bill Sullivan’s description of his series “3 Situations” and after looking at the images, I got intrigued and asked him whether he would be willing to talk about the ideas behind his work in more detail. I was quite excited to learn that he was happy to do that.
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Michael Wolf’s work first caught my attention when I discovered his Real Toy Story project - a depiction of under which conditions the toys found in Western toy stores are assembled. Just a little while later, Michael published Architecture of Density - large-scale photos of some of those humongous apartment buildings in Hong Kong. Given his continued output of interesting work, showing different aspects of life in Hong Kong, I asked him whether he would be available for an interview, and I was delighted to learn that he was.
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A few years back, Alec Soth’s Sleeping By the Mississippi took the photo world by storm. The book became one of those rare instant classics and a fine example of what contemporary photography can be about. With his next book, Niagara, published earlier this year, Alec managed to surprise a lot of people because of the subject matter. Just like “Mississippi”, “Niagara” contains an interesting mix of portraits, landscapes, interiors of buildings, and still lifes. Being a fan of his work, I was delighted when Alec agreed to talk with me about his work.
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When I saw Shen Wei’s portraits for the first time, I was struck by their expressiveness, which - invariably - had me thinking again about how photographic portraits can be approached - as a photographer, as a mere observer, and also as a subject. It was for that reason that I approached Shen Wei and asked him to talk about his work a little.
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If there is any kind of photography that I have my problems with it is photojournalistic photography from war zones. I usually refer to it as “war pornography”, and by that I mean that photos of dead or maimed soldiers or civilians are often just used for a cheap thrill, not unlike the sexual equivalent. Needless to say, this point of view is not all that fair. People usually tell me that photos from wars have the power to change our perception of wars; and I think a large part of my repulsion stems from me simply not seeing much evidence for that to be true. You just have to think back a few years, back when the Iraq war was not a very unpopular war that nobody really wanted, but a war that was necessary, with good reasons - I’m sure you will remember the jingoism. It was almost like those images from Vietnam, say, or the absolutely gruesome images from the earlier Gulf War. I will admit that some images have had an impact on the public’s perception of an ongoing war, but in all cases that I can think of, the war had already gone on for many - too many - years. Following one of my posts about some war photography, Roger Richards emailed me, and we had a brief exchange of emails about various topics. I was absolutely thrilled to be able to talk to somebody who had actually worked as a photojournalist during a war - Roger spent a long time in Bosnia during and after the war there. I think if there is any insight to be gained into the topic of what this kind of photojournalism can achieve and how it might have to be done, then that insight will not come from people who are writing articles (or silly blogs) from the comforts of their middle-class existences, but from people who have actually experienced the conditions, which produced the images we get to see. I was thus very happy to learn that Roger agreed to participate in one of my conversations with photographers.
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Consumption and shopping are such integral parts of what we like to call our culture that very often, we do not realize the full extent of the whole complex any longer. But what does this fact really lead to? I first noticed the importance of shopping when I told American friends that on Sundays German shops are closed (or rather used to be closed since things are changing there). The standard question “But what do people do on a Sunday?” was accompanied by either bewildered or outright horrified facial expressions. Brian Ulrich’s photography is centered on consumption and shopping, with him covering both shopping malls - maybe the most American of all experiences somebody could ever have - and thrift stores - places that I personally have been immensely fascinated with. I talked with Brian about the different aspects of his work.
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(This is the first of what I hope will be many conversations with photographers about their photography. I’ve always wanted to do this, and I hope this is going to become a regular feature here. My thanks to Jay Parkinson for agreeing to be the first person to be interviewed for this blog.) When I saw Jay Parkinson’s shots of aspiring models for the first time, I got quite interested in them. To start with, it is quite an interesting project to do since - at least from what I know - there is quite a bit more to the modeling world than those famous fashion models on cat walks. I have no idea how you become a model. Do you make a decision? And how do you decide to become a specialized model, say for hands or bondage or whatever else there is?
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