Most photographers have a well-developed signature style, inside the boundaries of which they produce their work. But there are also photographers who experiment a lot and whose bodies of work look very different. Thomas Ruff is maybe the most obvious example I can think of. Ralf Peters is another one (his website is not being updated, to see his newer work go here). Of course, Peters isn’t nearly as well-known as Ruff, but for those curious about the photographer’s work, there now is Until Today, a compilation covering photography from 1995 until today. (more)
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Whether “Walker Evans is probably the single greatest American photographer ever to have worked in the twentieth century” as Walker Evans: Decade by Decade asserts I don’t know. It does sound like a bit of a bold statement, given the competition. Bold claims aside, Walker Evans definitely was one of the most important American photographers of the past Century. This new volume, an overview of his entire oevre, from the early late 1920s work until the Polaroids from the 1970s, take a few year before his death, shows why.
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It is a well-known fact that the 1970s witnessed the emergence of colour photography as an art form. But just like in the case of the Founding Fathers - where everybody can usually name the one on the $1 bill - there is more to the story than just that small number of names or bodies of work that everybody is so familiar with today. For those interested in this part of photography history, there now is Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980. The book chronicles the emergence of colour photography in the US in the cultural context of its time, smartly outlining the work - and individual evolution - of a large number of practitioners.
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Architecture forms one of the pillars of history, or at least of memory. Where there is no architecture, where there are no buildings, a sense of history is much harder - if not often impossible - to discern. History, of course, is not something (metaphorically) set in stone, whereas architecture usually is (remember, wooden buildings usually don’t last across the time scales history deals with). So when we change history - or maybe one would want to “write when we change the way we interpret and view the facts that form the foundation of history” - or when history itself changes, we often have to change our thinking about architecture as well. There are few places where this is more obvious than Berlin.
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Yishay Garbasz’s mother was born in Berlin, Germany, four years before her family fled from the Nazis to Holland. During the war, she was deported first to Westerbork, then on to Theresienstadt, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to Christianstadt, and finally - via a death march - to Bergen-Belsen, where she was liberated by British forces in 1945. “It has been over sixty years since these events happened to my mother,” writes Garbasz, “yet their emotional legacy has shaped our family in many painful ways.” And: “Her complex behaviors made it very difficult for me to love her, and I had to dig very deep in order to uncover my true feelings and the underlying reasons for her behavior.”
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“The phone had rung and I had been offered an artist’s residency. I had hastily answered yes, going to stay in a small town in the Arctic for two months was what I wanted to do.” Thus begins the 24 page introduction to The Place of No Roads, written by Ville Lenkkeri, the photographer. I will admit that with any photography book, I always skip the text to look at the images first, to then return to the text later. For once, I wish I had done it the other way around.
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Television famously has been described as a self-referential medium, but it appears that it might be time to move beyond that. TV has now come to create its own actual reality, in what one could call an evolutionary step. And unlike in the case of the American ultra-conservatives’ version of such a newly (“faith based”) reality, this one is truly going to stay with us: the “faith based” reality only exists if you believe in it or, probably more accurately, if you want to believe in it; TV’s new reality exists even if you don’t want to believe it’s true. In this sense, what is called “reality TV” is not some form of TV any longer, it is a symbiosis of reality and TV, and it is not going away if we switch off the TV set.
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The fall of Communism, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and subsequent economic “shock therapies” have resulted in drastic changes all over Eastern Europe, with some countries being hit harder than others. For example, the male life expectancy in Russia has dropped to less than 59 years. Another example is the meteoric rise of the number of people who are either HIV positive or have full-blown AIDS in the Ukraine.
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Signs is Peter Granser’s third book about a part of the US (after Sun City and Coney Island), this time focusing on Texas. According to the publisher’s description, Signs “draws a telling picture of life today in America. For it, Granser traveled 12,000 miles through the ‘republic’ of Texas. With keen and objective precision, he focuses in his color photographs on the plethora of relics and signs that proliferate across the landscape and provide us with insights into the strange and contradictory state of contemporary American identity.”
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Popular folklore has it that German photographers have had a dominating influence on the aesthetics of contemporary photography. In this context, “German photographers” means people from Düsseldorf, with their “cool”, “detached” style and their “typologies”. Needless to say, this image is a mere caricature, and a pretty shoddily drawn one at that. In reality, German photography has become a very important part of contemporary photography, but while the Düsseldorf Art Academie has spawned quite a few well-known practitioners, there are many others whose work doesn’t conform at all to the “cool” and “unpersonal” style that is supposed to be what makes the “German” in “German photography”. To wit: Wolfgang Tillmans.
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At the beginning of the 21st Century, it seems that the only way to discover landscapes never seen before is to send robots and satellites to other planets or their moons. Those landscapes then amaze us, and I often wonder why that is. Have we really seen everything there is to see about our home planet? Is it the often somewhat unusual aesthetic of un-Earth-ly images, which are taken by often monochromatic, low-resolution cameras and only get their final look via the computer algorithms of scientists? Or is it just us, the viewers, being blasé after having seen everything? Everything?
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Why would someone load an 8x10 camera - a heavy and cumbersome piece of photographic equipment - into a small, inflatable craft and them move up the coast of Greenland to take photographs? There are probably many reasons for such an endeavour, and it would seem that picking just a single one would miss too many other important aspects. In that sense, treating Broken Line by Olaf Otto Becker as merely a book of landscapes, would be too one-dimensional.
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Andreas Gursky is one of the most important living photographers, despite the fact that his work is often being judged on nothing but else but its size or its price. While his photos are indeed monumental, size is merely a means to an end - as is obvious to a viewer who is confronted by one of Gursky’s photographs. The prints are not big simply because he can print them big, but because they have to be big, because of what they show and how they show it.
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Architecture is a form of art, just like photography or painting, and as such it says something about its time and about us. We, as spectators, often don’t see it as art - and how could we, if we are surrounded by, say, MacMansions? But who thinks of art in a Thomas Kinkade or Anne Geddes store? But then once we are exposed to what rises above the forgettable we just know that we are looking at a work of art, and not just that, we can usually even walk inside. Almost by construction (pun unintentional, but not unwelcome), contemporary architecture also contains an element of transition, an idea of showing us the world of tomorrow, or maybe more precisely what we hope the world of tomorrow might look like. Using architecture, we express our desire for a better future - and maybe that’s the reason why in the US - unlike in Europe - older architecture is often simply neglected and left to decay: Who wants to maintain the old, when they can get something new?
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There is no shortage of books about Havana and its decaying infrastructure, or about Paris and its architectural treasures; and there are many other such places which to some extent have been transformed into photographic clichés. “If Calcutta had the appeal of Havana,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s leading newspapers, wrote, “its palaces would long ago have become the subject of various coffee-table books.” And who says they don’t have that appeal? Thanks to Calcutta (Chitpur Road Neighborhoods), we now have the opportunity to see for ourselves.
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There is a lot of very interesting photography coming out of China. Unfortunately, we do not get to see much of it in the West. What we do get get to see is photography produced by Westerners who go to China to cover what we like to refer to as the “economic miracle” and , thus, our view of China is skewed towards images of production, of vast urban development, of ecological disasters. While there is no doubt that there has been some quite amazing work by visitors to China (see, for example, my review of Edward Burtynsky’s ‘China’), living with such an incomplete picture is not very satisfactory - especially in the light of Chinese photography itself.
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