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

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…

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

Close Up at the V&A Friday 26th September 2008

I’ve always been greatly inspired by Nick Thornton-Jones and Warren du Preez. Their approach is frequently to eschew the well-trodden commercial line and to play on the borders of art, fashion, technology and science.  When I heard that they were giving a talk at the V&A about their work, I nearly wet myself with excitement and I made sure I got down there pretty early to get in line, not dreaming that I’d manage to get a chance to see them.  I couldn’t believe my luck when I got to the front of the queue and was told that there were seats available.

The talk was on in the National Art Library and before the talk started we were invited by Warren and Nick to browse around various images from the archives.  There were prints by Julia Margaret-Cameron, Man Ray,  Moholy Nagy,  Eadweard Muybridge and others.  It was amazing to see these images from the archives up close and personal.

During the talk, Nick and Warren described their working methods while showing a slideshow of their work.  They admitted they were a little nervous about talking about their work as they had never done so in such a context before.  I felt especially privileged to be there when I heard this.  They described their method as ‘trying to recreate in camera, what used to be done in the dark room’.  And although there is often a lot of post production in some of their work – they mentioned ‘render farms’ processing their work for weeks – they aim to capture the bulk of what they do in camera.  The work that they had lain out for us was all relevant to their practice too – solarisation was a favourite technique of Man Ray’s and the creation of pictograms was a favourite method of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.  Coincidentally there was a Hungarian sat beside me.

The slideshow was really mind blowing – what has mostly stuck in my mind was the work they did with Alexander McQueen. And I shit you not when I said the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.  There was something chthonic, elemental, raw and occult-like about this series.  They admitted themselves that the shoot had been something of a happening whereby they were in the grip of forces  beyond themselves, of an energy that was more than the sum of the players in the shoot.

Ultimately I think it was very brave of them to reveal so much of their practice in public.  There were a few moments where Warren interrupted Nick with phrases like ‘without revealing too much of our methods’ and would turn the talk in another direction.  Nonetheless I was quite inspired.  To see more of their work, have a look here: Warren Du Preez, Nick Thornton-Jones

and I’ve borrowed a few of their images from their UK Agent’s website Artist Representation/Management

I hope they don’t sue my ass for it.