Review: 10 years of in-public

Trent Parke. Baker, Narrandera, 2006. From the series Coming soon.

Street photography is a strangely controversial photographic genre. When I started blogging, I was a little surprised at how divisive it seemed to be within the photo community and its ability to get people worked up, whether they were in the ‘for’ or ‘against’ camp. As with many other photographic genres ’street photography’ is a pretty broad appellation. There is no dictionary definition of it but a fair assumption would be that it refers to photographs taken in the street (I won’t wade in to the debate on whether those photographs have to be ’straight’ i.e. not to have undergone any manipulation, as that is a blogpost in and of itself), which seems to allow for a fair bit of artistic license. And yet, street photography seems to find itself in a bit of an artistic ghetto, often being, or feeling, completely ignored by the art world. I have already added to the recent debate surrounding Paul Graham’s essay The Unreasonable Apple on this subject, which, although it doesn’t deal with street photography specifically, is a good place to start to get an idea of what the fuss is about.

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Carlo Van de Roer capturing the essence

Yoko Okutsu, 2008

Yoko Okutsu, 2008

One of the most worn clichés in the realm of photography is the notion that a photographic portrait can somehow “capture the essence” of its subject. This has always struck me as pretty problematic; the idea that there is a moment that can be captured on film that encapsulates some fundamental truth about us, about who we really are seems to be a little reductive… I have always liked to think there was more to me than that. I can understand a photographer’s search for an image in which the subject is as natural as possible, forgets the camera and maybe even themselves. However, this may not be any more revealing about the person being photographed than an image in which the subject is playing to the camera, showing another side of themselves in the process.

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Ben Roberts: The Gathering Clouds

Old olive groves for sale, Granada. September 2007

Old olive groves for sale, Granada. September 2007

Summer has well and truly arrived. Every second email I get is trying to sell me my cut-price but nonetheless VIP place in the sun and thousands are hitting the congested roads towards the south for their annual holidays. This got me thinking about Ben Roberts’ series The Gathering Clouds which I came across a few months ago thanks to Dan. Roberts started shooting in Spain on the eve of the global financial meltdown which has now got Spain breathing down Greece’s neck in the race for the next European economy to collapse. His series shows the fragility of Spain’s construction boom and its strangely desolate aftermath. This is by no means a unique case, but I found these images to be an interesting illustration of Europe’s increasing precariousness.

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Takashi Homma: Adrift in the city of superflat

Takashi Homma, Tokyo and my Daughter

Takashi Homma, Tokyo and my Daughter

Self-promo alert: I’ve just written an essay on Takashi Homma’s series, Tokyo and my Daughter, for edition 23 of FOAM Magazine on City Life. Of course this brilliant piece of writing is reason enough to buy yourself a copy, but there happens to be some other really good stuff in there too, so now you really have no excuse.

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Is the photo-album giving way to the mixtape?

I recently attended a ‘conversation’ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris on the impact of blogs on photographic criticism. A hugely disappointing evening on all counts, including an extended discussion of image rights and how many photos it’s ok to include in a single blogpost, however one idea did emerge which piqued my interest. André Gunthert an academic specialised in ‘visual history’ and the founder of the online platform, Culture Visuelle, referred to the fact that academic research in the field of visual studies has been transformed by the availability and accessibility of images through the internet. Gunthert’s point, if I remember it correctly, was that disciplines like history of art had quite limited access to images before the internet due to the expense of image rights and the basic difficulty of getting your hands on a decent reproduction. Nowadays papers are presented supported by a healthy stack of images of all kinds for virtually no cost and this has changed the framework of analysis as it provides an essentially infinite comparative potential.

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Posted in Existentialist photo-ramblings, Magazines | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Venturing beyond the World Cup

David Goldblatt. George Nkomo, hawker, Fourways, Johannesburg, 2002

I saw a piece on BBC News yesterday lamenting the fact that most of the football fans who have travelled to South Africa for the World Cup are spending all their time between their hotel and a football stadium and are reluctant to venture any further than that. Apparently tourists have been assailed with warnings about South Africa’s astronomical crime rate and are now petrified at the idea of taking any path at all, let alone venturing beyond the beaten one.

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Pot for potholes

Laundry on Rue St-Urbain

One from the inbox: I received an email from husband and wife Claudia Ficca and Davide Luciano with links to their pothole photography project. Sadly, I do not have a driver’s licence, and therefore am unable to fully relate to the urban curse of the pothole. However, I have recently started watching Treme, David “The Wire” Simon’s new series on post-Katrina New Orleans, in which the character Davis McAlary runs for mayor with the slogan “Pot for Potholes”, so potholes have been taking up more place in my life of late.

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The photographic tinkerers

One of Miroslav Tichý's cameras

E and I recently won tickets to a concert by a Congolese band that I had never heard of, Staff Benda Bilili (‘benda bilili’ means beyond appearances). Apart from the incredible energy that these guys managed to generate despite 80% of the band being paraplegic and all of them living (or having lived) in the gardens of Kinshasa zoo, I was struck by one of the musicians, a teenage boy who somehow managed to extract some pretty amazing sounds out of an electrified tin can of his own conception. This got me thinking about the tinkerers in photography. It’s no secret that photographers can be a little gear-obsessed (I think they even give musicians a run for the money in that department) and the explosion of digital and associated software has done nothing to temper that, but are also a few garden shed eccentrics out there who are doing it entirely for themselves.

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Posted in Asian photography, European photography, Japanese photography, Tangents | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Interview: Eikoh Hosoe’s Butterfly Dream

Kazuo Ohno by Eikoh Hosoe

The exhibition, Eikoh Hosoe: Theatre of Memory has just closed at the Japanese Cultural Institute in Cologne. I did an interview with Hosoe during the opening weekend and a video extract has been posted on photographie.com.

Update: Just a few minutes after posting this, I found out that Kazuo Ohno has just passed away at the age of 103. The New York Times has an obituary here.

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The 10 most expensive photographs ever sold

First, a quick apology for the slow pace of posts on eyecurious over the past few weeks. Post frequency will be returning to normal very soon. In the meantime, here is a little slice of photographic miscellanea that made my jaw drop. Below is a list of the 10 most expensive photographs of all time. Have a quick look through and see if there is a name that stands out.

  1. Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent II Diptychon (2001), $3,346,456, February 2007, Sotheby’s London auction. 
  2. Edward Steichen, The Pond-Moonlight (1904), $2,928,000, February 2006, Sotheby’s New York auction.
  3. Dmitry Medvedev, Kremlin of Tobolsk (2009), $1,750,000, January 2010, Christmas Yarmarka, Saint Petersburg.
  4. Edward Weston, Nude (1925), $1,609,000, April 2008, Sotheby’s New York auction.
  5. Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe (Hands) (1919), $1,470,000, February 2006, Sotheby’s New York auction.
  6. Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe Nude (1919), $1,360,000, February 2006, Sotheby’s New York auction.
  7. Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy) (1989), $1,248,000, November 2005, Christie’s New York auction.
  8. Edward Weston, Nautilus (1927), $1,082,500, April 2010, Sotheby’s New York auction.
  9. Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, 113.Athènes, T[emple] de J[upiter] olympien pris de l’est (1842), $922,488, 2003, auction.
  10. Gustave Le Gray, The Great Wave, Sete (1857) $838,000, 1999.

(Source: the modern day Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia)

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