liquid visions…

This week, the 17th of March (St. Paddy’s day, no less) Sophie Ristelheuber was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize along with a nice fat cheque for £30,000. She was awarded the prize by Terry Gilliam in London.

I’d been to see the show recently and I quite enjoyed it. Some of the show was a little dry but still rewarding. Donovan Wylie’s images of the maze prison at first hit you with their sterility but with a little context you could see he was making a number of quite profound points about confinement, conformity/homogenisation, isolation and punishment.

Anna Fox’s images struck me for their playfulness and they struck me as the most enjoyable part of the show at the time but writing this a couple of weeks later I can barely remember the images. Ooops, sorry Anna. I must disclaim that she was one of my tutors at University although I didn’t know her very well. One of my friends Riika had helped with the construction of Anna’s displays.

Sophie’s images are of war scenes but the aftermath of war scenes. There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle over the fact that her images are (heavily?) manipulated in photoshop afterwards. And Seán O’Hagan in the guardian worries that we are no longer dealing with Photography but Conceptual Art in the Photography Prize. This debate over the so-called ‘truth’ in photography is not one that’s likely to abate soon. It’s been going on since the dawn of photography (and is especially vibrant in the genre of fashion photograpy). O’Hagan seems to lament the fact that the prize was not awarded for somebody advancing the medium of photography as a whole but rather as a reward for her art. I feel that he somehow overlooks the content of the images and focuses on the form. The images are powerful as political statements as well as being intriguing to look at.

Purists like to bang on about how little post-production they do to images but frankly my dears, I couldn’t give a damn. Photoshop the hell out of it if you like, Miss Ristelheuber. I don’t care if you used a freakin’ huge Hasselblad with gull wing doors or if you used a disposable party camera, if the end results are good, I don’t see any point in arguing about the technology. Spin it round the Hadron Collider (the large one, even) a few times for good measure if it gets your rocks off. Meanwhile, others beg to differ. A Ukrainian Photographer Stepan Rudik was recently awarded 3rd prize for his story in the Sports Features category in the World Press Photo competition. He was later disqualified for having removed a portion of a foot from the raw image. Have a look for yourself.

My mind boggled at the fact that they weren’t chastising him for his vicious crop, converting to black and white, the massively added grain or the heavy vignetting – they disqualified him for removing a tiny nubbin of a toe (that did mar the impact of the image). Not that I have any problem with Rudik’s post-production. In fact I was impressed by his crop and how he had managed to distill the essence of the moment into a powerful image from what was otherwise a relatively banal shot.

While we’re at it, this story about a photographer, Jose Luis Rodriguez, disqualified from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year (after having won) for his use of a hired wolf.

More information here. In this instance liberties were taken. A firm slap on the wrist rightfully deserved. Naughty!

Creative license taken to the extreme – Ralph Lauren recently had to make an embarassing apology after someone got a bit over the top with the editing suite…

Check the way her head is bigger than her waist. Initially it was thought that the retouching was done by a third party but embarrasingly it was done in-house.

Sometimes the Photoshop Crop tool is all you need…

Sometimes I think I am really spoiled living in London – you get to see the most amazing, world class photography exhibitions. I had a meeting that fell through today so I skived off and caught the Irving Penn – Portraits exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. I loved the show. It was a lesson in simplicity. Beautiful simple portraits that are deceptively masterful. Arranged chronologically (yawn…), the images are simply lit, usually one light source, often daylight and the subjects all look very comfortable and authentic. Well a few were a bit stagey, like Hussein Chalayan but they can’t ALL be winners.

One thing I took away from the exhibition – repetition. He wasn’t afraid of repeating himself. He moved into a studio in Paris and must have used the same backdrop – a canvas discarded from a circus – for over 20 years. But it’s this repetition that makes us focus on the sitters, and not the setting and makes the images all the more powerful.

I especially liked the series of portraits of the sitters squeezed into a tight corner frame, forcing them to arrange themselves in a confined space.

Beautifully printed platinum and Gelatin prints, some from the 1940′s. Wonderful, inspiring, check it out if you can.

Until the 6th of June 2010

Had the opportunity to take a few shots of Gok and Fearne while at the CSL… Gok was very friendly and energetic. I had seen his schedule for the day (I spent most of the day running around photographing him) so I asked him if he felt it was a lot of pressure. He said: ‘I really don’t mind so much because the audience are here to talk about fashion and that keeps my energy up as they’re an attentive audience. I know by the end of the day I’ll collapse exhausted on the way home, though’. I found him very friendly and a pleasure to be around.

Fearne was sweet too although I got the feeling she was slightly awed by the mob that arrived to see her at the Ice Bar signing. Have to be very patient to contend with a mass of screaming girls and a mosh pit of photographers. I bumped a few young girls getting my shot and got a firm talking to by one of the bouncers – ‘they’re only little girls, mate, you can’t be bashing them ’round’. A lesson in sensitivity from a man built like a gorilla. Oops!!! Mea Culpa…

A friend of mine recently had an exhibition. He’s a creative hair stylist goes by the name of Andrew Thomas Corbett and we collaborated recently to create a series of images. The show was on in the Resistance Gallery in Bethnal Green a few weeks ago but I’ve been too busy covering the Clothes Show in Birmingham for the last week to post about it.

A little about the show here.

The images we created are below.
Hair and Concept by Andrew
Model Magda from Leni’s Model Management
Makeup Angela Deviatova
Photography and Post by Moi…

This was one of the most powerful exhibitions I’ve been to in a long time. Massive in scale, comprehensive in its inclusions and deep in background material, this was such an enjoyable show from start to finish. I’m a massive Bacon fan to start with and I know he’s not for everyone but I thoroughly recommend.

Further coverage on the Tate’s site.

Charles Darwent’s review on the Telegraph’s site.

While I was at the Tate i popped in to see the Turner Prize. The usual detritus designed to get up the nose of the public.

Judging by what was on show, and I’ve not been as avid an art gallery visitor since I graduated from Art college, I do feel that Marc Leckey was the deserved winner. In writing that I realise how strange it is to have a horse race for artists, ifn y’all catch ma drift…

After waiting a few weeks for the right opportunity to see this exhibition I finally managed to find the chance to go on a Monday afternoon. I knew this would be a popular exhibition and was dreading the thought of having to go in on a weekend when I knew it would be reamed.

Even though it was Monday it was still pretty busy but not in such a way that it was unpleasant to negotiate the show. In general, I’m a big fan of Leibovitz’s work and was relishing the idea of seeing some of her more celebrated work up close and in this respect I wasn’t disappointed. Many of the iconic pieces she’s become celebrated for are in the show – among the famous – Brad Pitt lolling around in some anonymous motel, Demi Moore heavily pregnant, and among the infamous – various heads of state including the newly inaugurated George Bush in the Oval office at the beginning of his last term surrounded by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et. al.

I’ve always admired Leibovitz for the cinematic quality to her work – the beautifully controlled lighting, the wonderful composition and the sense of drama evoked from her compositions. She has a wonderful ability to evoke something quintessential about her subjects and to somehow dip below the usually carefully stage managed personas of her subjects. And this is why I was so underwhelmed by her personal shots. Although the narratives are profound – the death of her long time lover Susan Sontag to leukaemia, the death of her father, the birth of her daughters, the images are in my opinion banal. It’s as if there’s two very different photographers on show here – one a brilliant, creative, talented individual and another reasonably competent amateur sharing space and one drags the other down.

I visited the Araki exhibition at the Barbican a few years ago and whether you love or hate the man’s work at least you could see that his is not a completely compartmentalised artistry. Polaroids of bondage shared space with polaroids of his daily meals and each were as engrossing and visually stunning as the other. The emptiness of the photos he took after the death of his wife – shots on the roof of his apartment were testaments to the despair and loss and possibly the rudderlessness he experienced after his death. I felt no such emotion or expression from Leibovitz. More of an impassive voyeurism with little connection to the subjects which is nearly the opposite of her magnificent editorial work.

It piqued me personally to see her quote about studio photographers (caveat: I am one): “I don’t like trying to make something happen in the studio. It feels cheap to me,” as this is exactly what she does in her practice. Her work is all about making that iconic moment and whether it happens in the studio or on location is moot. And on top of that much of her work is studio based and are all her subjects not performing for the camera anyway?

Although there’s some duplication from the Vanity Fair Portraits on show at the national portrait gallery earlier in the year there’s quite an amount of work I’d never seen before and much I’d seen but only in magazines, I would strongly recommend checking it out.

Annie Leibovitz at the National Portrait Gallery until 1st February 2009