Linus Bill's answer to the question "If you weren't a photographer what would you be?"

The creative website of the franco-German TV channel Arte has started a great little weekly series of interviews with ‘emerging’ photographers entitled Picture this! The interviewees are not the usual suspects (I will confess I only recognised 2 or 3 names on the list), but it’s the format of the interviews that is the real hook: the interview follows a standard 10-question format which is to be answered… in pictures. This often leads to visual gags, but it’s interesting to see how the character of a photographer can emerge from such a small selection of pictures.

Related posts:

1. A picture of a woman

Marie Quéau from the series Gojira

I have just done a short guest post over on the fototazo blog. fototazo has asked a group of 50 curators, gallery owners, blog writers, photographers, academics and others actively engaged in photography to pick two photographers that deserve (more) recognition – the underknown, the under-respected as well as not-appreciated-enough favorites. For my guest post, I selected Marie Quéau and Erik van der Weijde. Check out the post here and look out for an interview with Marie Quéau, coming up soon on eyecurious.

Linus Bill / Erik van der Weijde: Linus’ family in Switzerland and Erik's family in Brazil.

Related posts:

1. Book of the Week #2: Erik Van der Weijde / Der Baum
2. Guest ‘curator’ on Bite! magazine
3. Picture this!

Hyères doesn’t have the same visibility as the Rencontres d’Arles and in fairness the festival takes place on a much more intimate scale than the vast sprawl of it’s cousin from up the road. Whereas a lot of the work being presented in Arles is well-known and critically recognised, Hyères functions more like a photographic incubator, both by focusing the competition on emerging young talent and also by exhibiting work that you are unlikely to see elsewhere. For instance the 2011 festival included a selection of Erwin Blumenfeld’s photographs all of which were used as Vogue covers, something you are unlikely to see in a photography museum. After seeing this show and stepping into a newsagents, I couldn’t help feeling that fashion photography as a genre seems to have regressed hugely from the inventiveness and experimentation of Blumenfeld’s era, particularly for established magazines like Vogue.

Anouk Kruithof, The Daily Exhaustion

The core of the photography component of the festival is a group exhibition of a shortlist of 10 emerging photographers, one or several of whom are selected by a jury for a grand prize. A look back at the shortlisted photographers from previous festivals and you are guaranteed to find not only excellent and exciting work and a lot of genuine discoveries. This year was no different, with work by Andrey Bogush, Kim Boske, Emily Hyperion Dubuisson, Katarina Elvén, Anouk Kruithof, Ina Jang, Mårten Lange, Marie Queau, Awoiska van der Molen and Marc Philip van Kempen. Most of the short-listed photographers  have no experience of fashion photography at all and, in addition to the grand prize, a few of them may find themselves trying their hand at it for the first time following Hyères, an exercise which I think would be fascinating for any emerging photographer.

This year’s grand prize winner was the young Dutch photographer Anouk Kruithof. She was selected unanimously by the jury for her inventiveness and her versatility. The series she presented at Hyères, the Daily Exhaustion, is a wonderfully simple idea in an equally wonderfully simple book/zine form, but I also recommend a trip to her website which is full of interesting material. A special mention was also given to Katarina Elvén, a set designer from Sweden who is working on a an ambitious but very thoughtful project relating to surface and aesthetics… one to look out for in the future. I also made another discovery in Hyères, but this one was on the jury rather than the shortlist. Fellow jury member and a photographer, provocateur and penseur, Jason Evans: the man behind the Daily Nice, the New Scent, contributor to the terrific Words Without Pictures and much more.

Jury deliberations

One particularly refreshing aspect of the festival is the time that is allocated to see each photographer. Portfolio reviews, which appear to be becoming more and more popular, seldom offer more than 20 minutes per review whereas at Hyères jurors spend between anything between 30 minutes and 1h30 with each of the shortlisted photographers, almost enough time for a conversation. But the thing that really makes Hyères stand out from other photography festivals is that it creates a space to consider photography in a different context. Just by combining fashion and photography, the festival is forcing us to reconsider what we think of as photography and offering a reminder of how insular the ‘fine art photography’ world can be. Whether you like fashion photography (or any other applied photography for that matter) or not, it has to be recognised that it is too often dismissed as inferior or just plain ignored by the art photography world. During my four days in Hyères I found myself having more conversations about photography in its many different forms than I have at all the other photography festivals I have attended put together.

Aside from these issues of substance, combine the fact that this all takes place in an absolutely gorgeous 1930s modernist villa and that being on photo-jury duty also involves a collective swim in the Mediterranean and you will understand why Hyères has immediately become a personal favourite.

Related posts:

1. This is not a review: Paris Photo 2011

Christophe Maout, HomeLux

Paris earned the nickname of ‘ville lumière‘ (City of Light) from having been an ideological home to the age of enlightenment and for it’s famous street lights. Like these lights, the 19th century Haussmanian architecture of the city has come to typify the French capital in most outsiders’ imagining of the city. So Christophe Maout‘s vision of Paris in HomeLux might come as a bit of a shock. HomeLux is shot on the city’s periphery, specifically off the boulevard périphérique, the main ring road surrounding the city. The périphérique ferries traffic around the city and is one of the few areas of Paris where towerblocks appear regularly. Many of these blocks bear the name of major brands in the form of brightly-coloured neon crowns, an advertising practice that is forbidden within the center of the city. The series struck me as a kind of allegory, a preserved city, suspended in time, surrounded by an army of advancing towerblocks shouting their commercial messages at the constant flow of cars circumnavigating the city. The rooftop perspectives in these night exposures give the buildings a different quality, their neon halos seeming to give each building its distinct personality. I met Maout at a dinner last December and, as he gave us a lift home, we drove past many of these buildings lighting up that freezing winter night. A very different view of the city of light.

Related posts:

1. Review: Inger Lise Rasmussen, Brilliant City

After Mariken Wessels‘ two mysterious tomes (one of which was reviewed here) which seemed to make most ‘best of 2010′ photobook lists, our Dutch friends have done it again and produced a book which really should not exist. I couldn’t help but try to imagine this book idea being pitched to any halfway-sane book publisher, “I want to do a big, 150-page book of portraits of out-of-shape, middle-aged men who try to cycle up this mountain that most people have never heard of, but which has a cool name. The portraits will all be taken from the same head-on perspective with some kind of telephoto lens, they’ll be tightly cropped and really flat and even out of focus sometimes because they’re cycling up a mountain and the guys will all be sweating and in varying degrees of pain. Oh and as a bonus feature, I’ll throw in a promotional website with a background video of one of the cyclists throwing up on the side of the road while some other guys ride past him.” 99% of the time he would literally be escorted out of the building, possibly with a restraining order thrown in for good measure, and yet the good people of Habbekrats decided that there was some part of this project that was actually a good idea. The funny thing is that they were right.

There is nothing about this book that should interest me. I’m all for the odd bike ride but serious cycling leaves me cold… sweaty middle-aged men trying to reach their physical limits leaves me even colder. And yet, I was drawn in. Like it’s non-illustrated cousins, 2008′s Netherland about New York cricketers and current favourite The Hare with Amber Eyes (a 350-page book written about a collection of Japanese netsuke, tiny bone or ivory sculptures), Mont Purgatoire is not really about its (not particularly sexy) subject. Although the book comes with a number of essays written by cyclists, cycling poets and sports writers, the photographs it contains provide no context of the gruelling cycle that these men undertake to make it to the top of this mountain. For all we know, Van der Ploeg never even went near the place. I don’t think it’s going to reach quite the same sales figures as its fictional cousins, but what I found interesting is the way that it goes beyond its apparent subject to become a kind of study of the way we express feeling. Thumbing through its pages, you can’t help but wonder what is going through these men’s minds and why they are attempting this punishing climb. Their expressions convey the emotions that you would expect determination, exhaustion, focus, but often also a strong sense of introspection, as if this was less about proving their physical resilience or strength and more a process of self-flagellation.

As with most of the Dutch photo-books I’ve set my hands on of late, the book is very well made, with a really simple but intelligent and appropriate design. I particularly enjoyed the way that the essays were printed on newsprintish paper and designed to look like excerpts of a fictional (?) local Dutch newspaper. In its own (tongue-in-cheek, faux-Hollywood) words “Mont Purgatoire is an extraordinary photography-project about ordinary men, voluntarily battling their own strength on the steepest slopes.” If you’re curious to find out more, check out the book’s website and I also recommend a trip to Van der Ploeg’s website to get a view of his interest in the human face and what he has been doing with it in other contexts.

Adriaan van der Ploeg, Mont Purgatoire. Habbekrats (Soft cover, 144 pages, colour plates, 2010).

Rating: Recommended

Related posts:

1. Review: Mariken Wessels, Queen Ann. P.S. Belly Cut Off
2. Review: Valerio Spada, Gomorrah Girl
3. Review: 10 years of in-public

Chris Engman, The Meeting, 2004.

Chris Engman‘s series Landscapes is based on the vast open spaces of Washington State outside of Seattle, where Engman lives. The title of the series, just like the images themselves, suggests one thing, while revealing many others. He has a show on at the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle until Christmas Eve 2010. This interview with Engman was done for the Talent Issue (#24) of Foam magazine which came out in September 2010.

Marc Feustel: What attracted you to the landscapes of eastern Washington that you use for your photographs?

Chris Engman: When I set out to make a photograph I begin with an idea. I write about it, turn it over in my mind, and gradually the requirements for a site take shape. I then go out and drive, sometimes for a long time, until I find that site. The idea is not a response to the landscape; in my work the land­scape is a response to the idea. Once I’ve found and used a site I become attached to it, and there are some that I frequently revisit. They go from being spaces where I am free to let my imagination wander to being places with a personal history and familiarity. I have dreams about buy­ing up all that land and doing nothing with it so that it will be left alone.

MF: You refer to these landscapes as resembling ‘an unformed dream or empty canvas waiting to be acted upon.’ What made you want to intervene in these landscapes?

CE: They fulfilled the requirements for the illustration of my ideas. When I refer to these spaces as an empty canvas I mean that they are relatively free from distracting associations, so that the work can just be the work. Undeveloped land, ocean views, deserts, the associations they have are ones that are appropriate to the work: freedom, possibility and a desire for purity.

MF: The Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama has suggested that ‘nature is already so distant from us that you might say it has become a fantasy’. Is this an idea that resonates with you?

CE: I don’t personally feel more distant from nature than I want to be. My work affords me a lot of opportunities to be in nature and for adventure and misadventure. Being and working in extreme places connects me to nature by confirming the power it has over me. I don’t really imagine that there is such a strict division between man and nature. We are a part of nature, when we harm it we harm ourselves.

Chris Engman, Equivalence, 2009.

MF: Can you describe how you go about constructing your images? The process seems quite elaborate.

CE: Every image presents unique challenges. In the case of Equivalence, to begin with I found a suitable piece of private land and got permission to use it. I built a frame and photographed it. Back in Seattle I made fifteen large prints altogether measuring 4.5 meters wide and over 3.5 meters high. The prints had to be skewed digitally to account for the fact that the frame was not parallel to the film plane. I returned to eastern Washington and placed the prints back onto the same frame. In the final photograph you wouldn’t know by looking at it that the prints were ever skewed be­ cause the camera, replaced to its original location, skews them again back into ‘correct’ perspective. The piece is titled after the series of clouds by Alfred Stieglitz, in which he suggests that his images of clouds can represent inner states and emotions. My version asserts that photographs are not objective and can only ever tell partial truths, and beauty and emotion are constructs of the mind. For me this doesn’t lessen photography, beauty or emotion but makes them all the more interesting.

MF: Manipulation in photography is not new, but digital technology has extended the range of possibilities and the line between straight and manipulated photographs is increasingly blurry. Do you think people’s perceptions of what a photograph is are changing as a result?

CE: One question I get a lot is are they manipulated? The answer is supposed to be no, they are ‘real.’ This is a false dichotomy. All forms of representation are manipulation. But the question gets asked, and at the root of it is a desire for authenticity. What needs to be better understood is that sometimes even heavily manipulated images are truthful and sometimes straight photographs tell lies, so there should be a different set of criteria for authenticity. My own photographs are in many ways closer to what is meant by straight than not. That is, the majority of the digital manipulation that I do could have, at least theoretically, been done in a darkroom. However, I have no qualms about crossing that line when necessary. In The Haul, for example, street signs and text on the buildings have been removed so that the place would have a more generic quality. One thing I will not do is pretend I did something that I did not do. Many photographers are finding ways to make their work be less work, while I have gone in the opposite direction. My photographs are laboured, and they don’t take short cuts. In that sense I am like a sculptor or installation artist who uses photography as a tool.

Chris Engman, The Haul, 2006.

MF: I am curious to know about your influences and in particular your relationship to landscape photography. Your work occupies quite a unique space and it seems to integrate many different photographic and artistic traditions.

CE: I think a lot about Robert Smithson’s work relating to time and place. The Earthworks artists often have more in common with my process and practice than do landscape photographers. I enjoy the work of Michael Heizer and Walter De Maria, Georges Rousse and Robert Irwin. The re-photographic work of Mark Klett has been an influence recently. Fiction by writers such as Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Faulkner and Hemingway often directly spurs ideas for particular photographs. Also the writings of the neurologist Oliver Sacks are an influence.

MF: As opposed to many contemporary landscape photographers your photographs don’t seem to have a direct message about the relationship between man and nature. Do you consider that there is a political aspect to your work?

CE: I am a political person but my work is not directly political. A lot of contemporary landscape photography is concerned with human exploitation of the landscape, usually with a pessimistic or nostalgic undertone. Although I am of course concerned about exploitation, the subject of my work concerns abstract ideas relating to perception and the human condition. On the other hand a few of my works do contain some subtle social criticism. One way to read The Haul, for example, is as a questioning of consumerism and the ideas about success that drive us to always want more and do more and never be content. The piece expresses a desire to travel through life with a lighter load.

MF: What are you working on at the moment?

CE: The piece I’m working on is a diptych called Dust to Dust. My plan is to find or make a large pile of sand or dirt and photograph it. For the second part of the diptych I will employ land-moving equipment to rotate the pile ninety degrees clockwise. The mountain of dirt will be reformed in its original shape, the shadows will be repeated with careful timing and camera placement. In this way the pile of dirt will appear to remain stationary while the landscape itself will appear to have moved. The piece is a meditation on impermanence and the fact that not only existence but even the features of the physical world are temporal and will come to an end.

Chris Engman, The Disappearance, 2006.

Related posts:

1. Interview: Christian Schink, A different kind of discovery

Vincent Fournier, Space Project

Earlier this week Obama signed the NASA 2010 Authorization Act into law, which guarantees NASA a decent chunk of change, although the specifics of how it’s going to be spent are still up in the air. However, we do know that the moon is passé and now the focus is firmly on Mars. I suppose Richard Branson is now taking over the moon route anyway and before we know it Easyjet and Ryanair will be undercutting him. All of this talk of space travel brought to mind Vincent Fournier’s great series Space Project on our long-lasting fascination with space.

Related posts:

1. Review: Steven B. Smith, The Weather and a Place to Live

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.

No related posts.

Goro Bertz

When I was in Stockholm for the opening of Tokyo Stories, Maria from the Kulturhuset spoke to me about a young photographer who is half-Swedish and half-Japanese, Goro Bertz. Bertz doesn’t have a functional website that I could find, but I did manage to track down some of his images on a few Swedish blogs. Perhaps it’s wrong to suggest that Bertz is half-Swedish, half-Japanese. The reason I mention this is because he is clearly influenced by Japanese photography and shoots on the sacred street photography terrain that is Shinjuku, but, although his mother is Japanese he was born and raised in Sweden and is coming to this photography from the perspective of an outsider. What I found particularly interesting in his work is how it seems influenced both by Christer Strömholm and Anders Petersen as well as by Japanese photographers, most obviously Daido Moriyama. He juggles with colour, black-and-white and with different styles, and wears his influences on his sleeve, but I found that he manages to weave these pretty diverse elements into a very coherent whole that feels quite personal and sincere. There is an interesting online exhibition including a long text by Bertz (in English) which gives a good sense of his approach as well as a short slideshow complete with dramatic narration (in Swedish) which are worth a look to see more of his work. Definitely one to watch.

Goro Bertz

Goro Bertz

Related posts:

1. Review: From Back Home (book and exhibition)

Giacomo Brunelli, The Animals

Giacomo Brunelli is currently showing his work The Animals at London’s Photofusion gallery (until March 26th). Brunelli’s images have a ferocity that is absent in a lot of wildlife photography. The images are not shot from a human perspective but from that of the animals themselves, which contributes to the immersiveness and energy of the images. This is not a photographic portrait that seeks to emphasize the human traits of animals or the majesty and elegance of the animal kingdom. Brunelli’s “animal-focused street photography” highlights the bestial traits of these animals, and the presence of violence and death comes through to powerful effect.

Giacomo Brunelli, The Animals

Giacomo Brunelli, The Animals

Related posts:

1. Richard Barnes