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.

To use a musical analogy, I sometimes think of street photography as the jazz of the photography world. A genre that requires great timing, a strong sense of improvisation and that appeals especially to men with beards. Arguably the progression of street photography over time has mirrored that of jazz pretty closely. Jazz went through a series of creative explosions in the 50s, 60s and 70s through which the genre was constantly radically redefined. Since then, it is generally perceived to have been unable to reinvent itself and people think of it as an old-school genre rather than a contemporary one. I think much of the criticism that is levelled at street photography follows a similar line.

Paul Russell. Bristol, 2007.

I am like Switzerland in my position on street photography: neutral. I’m not instinctively drawn to it, but I definitely don’t think of it as irrelevant or unworthy of a place in the art world. So I was intrigued when Nick Turpin recently sent me a copy of his latest book, 10, 10 years of in-Public celebrating ten years of in-Public, the street photography collective started by Turpin that is now twenty members strong. This seemed like a good opportunity to see a broad cross-section of what is going on in street photography, with ten images from each of the group’s members. I won’t name them all here, but a special mention has to go to fellow bloggers Blake Andrews and Jeffrey Ladd.

It’s always difficult to review a book that covers as much material as 10 as it is never going to be entirely coherent with this many different voices being represented. For me the real strength of the book is that it makes a strong case for the continued relevance of street photography today and more importantly for how diverse a genre it can be. To go back to my musical analogy, yes this is a compilation album, but its more like one of those artfully put together Soul Jazz numbers than a ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ #472. You get work from right across the spectrum: classic be-bop images, fizzing hard-bop, free jazz, to the more spacey ECM (“most beautiful sound after silence”) style … thankfully I didn’t spot any easy listening shots in here.

Nils Jorgensen. London, 2006.

There are some attributes that are common to much of the work in this book: a sense of humour, a penchant for the surreal, but the overriding impression I got was one of a real diversity in style and approach. For my money, street photography really comes into its own when these moments captured on the fly can be woven into a broader tapestry of some kind, not necessarily a narrative, but tied together in a way that transforms them into something more than a collection of well-composed moments. This isn’t the case of all the photographers in the book, but when it is, as in the case of Trent Parke (whose recent book Bedknobs and Broomsticks sold 1,000 copies in three days), it can be really rewarding.

The book includes an essay by the Guardian’s Jonathan Glancey and interviews of all the photographers by the photography writer David Clark. Rather than posting several images, you can get a nice preview of the contents of the book in the slideshow below put together by Turpin. 10 is recommended, if nothing else as proof that street photography is alive and well.

10 years of in-Public, London: Nick Turpin Publishing, Hardback, colour and black-and-white plates.

Rating: Recommended

Related posts:

1. Review: Mao Ishikawa, Life in Philly
2. Review: From Back Home (book and exhibition)
3. Arles 2009: 40 years and Nan Goldin

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.

Whatever your take on the ability of a photograph to capture someone’s essence, it turns out that there is a camera that is built to capture something pretty close to it. The aura camera was developed by an American scientist in an attempt to record what psychics might see (or perhaps those that are fond of the odd acidic experiment) when they look at someone’s aura. Carlo Van de Roer’s Portrait Machine project makes use of the aura camera to show us a few celebrity and other lesser-known auras and raise some interesting questions about the photographic portrait and the roles of the subject, the photographer and the viewer. The camera works by connecting the subject “directly to the camera by hand-plates that measure biofeedback, which the camera depicts as an aura of color in the Polaroid and translates into a printed diagram and description explaining the camera’s interpretation of the subject. It also explains separately, what the the subject is expressing and how they are seen by others. … This printout, which includes information about the subjects emotions, potential, aspirations, future, etc. is presented to the viewer along with each photograph”. Click here to see the camera’s description of Yoko Okutsu’s remarkable aura (above).

If you are feeling inspired by Carlo Van de Roer’s work, you might want to try out aura photography for yourself. Luckily it turns out that there is an online specialist aura camera store through which you can buy yourself the necessary equipment. The aura camera is currently discounted to a mere $3,497.00 (a remarkably specific price) and even better, their latest 3.1 version doesn’t require those cumbersome hand plates and is a “nicer black color” than the previous one. What on earth are you waiting for?

No related posts.

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.

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.

Related posts:

1. Paris in Amsterdam
2. Guest ‘curator’ on Bite! magazine
3. Mariko Takeuchi on contemporary Japanese photography

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.

This struck me as an interesting evolution and got me wondering about the impact of websites and photo-blogs on the way that we consume photographic images. One parallel would be the increasing obsolescence of the album as a musical format. Although artists still produce music in this way for the most part, only a small percentage of listeners are likely to listen to an album from start to finish anymore. The album has essentially been replaced by the mixtape, where music is consumed according to a style, mood, or that little iTunes robot that Apple mistakenly decided to call Genius and its ADD-ridden cousin Shuffle.

Something similar has happened to photography when it comes to the online world. With the proliferation of photographer websites, blogs, online webzines and, most of all, facebook posts, photographs get to us in increasingly fragmented ways and as most enthusiasts get their fix through a daily mix of all of the above (with an extra meta-layer courtesy of an RSS reader) this fragmentation just tends to get compounded. The most extreme example of this in my experience is probably Tumblr where ‘following’ 50 or so tumblelogs leads to a never-ending stream of single images for you to like, reblog, or simply choke on.

There are limits to the comparison of course as these online media don’t just shuffle images into a random order and we still tend to consume photographs in a more-or-less intended sequence. However, although they remain essential, it does seem that photobooks and exhibitions represent a steadily decreasing slice of the photographic pie.

So what impact is this all having on photography? On the positive side, we could hope to see new connections being made between photographers and groups of work that may be geographically remote but linked through their approach or their subject matter. I think it is also safe to say that it is a lot easier nowadays to get a more general sense of what is happening in photography around the globe. At the risk of stating the obvious, on the negative side we are all at risk of drowning in a sea of images from which it is very difficult for anything to stand out for more than a brief moment.

From my perspective, I find it quite difficult to identify any major trends emerging from the chaotic growth of photography online. In terms of blogs, I think that posts involving an image or two and a ‘thumbs-up’-style comment linking to the photographer’s site are on the decline and are being replaced by a cluster of interesting hubs with some kind of dominant flavour which you can count on for a little stimulation. Following on from Andy’s discussion on whether Facebook is replacing photo-blogs, despite the astonishing explosion on that platform in recent months, I certainly hope not, as Facebook is a pretty inflexible and ugly way for presenting photographs. Apart from resurrecting old work and giving it a new audience (cf. American Suburb X) one of the only positives I have seen on Facebook is Blake’s example of Craig Hickman who has been posting photos at a daily rate on his Facebook wall from his series Fictional Photographs. This strikes me as a genuinely new way of building and disseminating a series of photographs.

To return to my earlier analogy, it could be interesting to see photography going the way of music where the mega-stars of the 1960-2000 years have been replaced by an incredible range of cross-bred music of every imaginable form and provenance, and where it is fairly easy to completely ignore anything overly commercial or mass-produced. That world may be some people’s idea of hell, but I’d definitely be keen to pay it a visit.

Related posts:

1. Some more fuel on the photo-book fire
2. Photo-journalism: leaving Nachtwey behind
3. NY Photo Festival Blogging Panel

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.

While I’m sure that South Africa is not about to win any personal safety awards, there is something a little tragic about the idea that all these people will see virtually nothing of the country itself. My own experience of South Africa is limited to a handful of  photographs that I have seen and a couple of Coetzee’s novels so I am no expert, but I thought it was still worth posting this (far from exhaustive) list of a few opportunities to see more of South Africa than a vuvuzela-filled football stadium.

New York’s Jewish Museum is currently exhibiting 150 prints of David Goldblatt’s photographs of South Africa (May 2 – Sep. 19) as well as four films by the South African artist William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection. A little closer to my neck of the woods, the Centre du Patrimoine Arménien in Valence is showing photographs by Anne Rearick and Guy Tillim on post-Apartheid South Africa. I also recently received a copy of Per Englund’s Life Geos On, a bittersweet diary of a handful of summers spent in Cape Town. Try seeing any of these and you’ll probably have seen more of South Africa than many of those who will be spending the next month there.

No related posts.

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.

Spaghetti & Meatballs on Greenwich Street

Until Ficca and Luciano came on I had never realized the myriad potential applications for these simple holes in the road: a convenient place to crush grapes, great when all the dishes are dirty and you’re looking for something to eat your bolognese out of, or just a handy outdoor laundry basin. In their hands there’s not much that a pothole can’t do.

Winemaking on Rue St-Zotique

No related posts.

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.

Miroslav Tichý, Untitled, n.d.

The most recognized example of this that I could think of is Miroslav Tichý. He was ‘discovered’ a few years ago, living in isolation in his hometown of Kyjov in the Czech Republic in a house full of self-made photographic paraphernalia of all kinds which he used to surreptitiously photograph the women of his town. Thanks to his seemingly endless supply of completely unique vintage prints (helped by the fact that he had trampled on most of them for several years, before mounting them on cardboard frames which he then decorated himself… any photo dealer’s wet dream) he has become extremely hot property and he is now represented by several galleries in Europe alone. While I haven’t been swept away by his outsider art, I was fascinated to see the cameras and lenses that Tichý has made and how they had contributed to forging his undeniably unique aesthetic.

Ryuji Miyamoto, Pinhole Naoshima

In a completely different genre, another photographer who has explored the possibilities of the self-made is Ryuji Miyamoto, who I have written about before on the blog. After many years shooting with a large format camera, Miyamoto developed a desire to be able to climb inside the camera after shooting his series Cardboard Houses on the cardboard structures built by the homeless in different cities. He ended up making a small wooden hut which he transformed into a camera obscura and which he lines with two sheets of light-sensitive photo paper. Miyamoto gets in, lies down and exposes the paper to light. The result is an upside-down image of the world captured in deep blue tones where his silhouette appears at the bottom of the image. Miyamoto’s pinhole images and his recent photograms suggest that he isn’t exactly enamored by the infinite reproducibility of photography in the digital age.

These are just a couple of examples that came to mind—I would be curious to hear if there are others. Perhaps none of this matters and just as buying the latest top of the line camera will not get you good photographs, building your own is no guarantee of a personal vision. But I like to think that in the process of building the tool with which you are going to photograph the world, there is a small chance of stumbling upon something that we may not have seen before.

Related posts:

1. Ryuji Miyamoto: the grass, the bugs
2. Ryuji Miyamoto

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.

Related posts:

1. March Madness: 1 month, 2 exhibitions
2. Interview with Toshio Shibata
3. Interview: Hiroh Kikai, A man in the cosmos

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)

No, your eyes are not playing tricks on you (although Wikipedia may very well be): Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian President, is second only to Gursky and Steichen for this view of the Kremlin Tobolsk.

Dmitry Medvedev, Tobolsk Kremlin

Admittedly he achieved his tidy $1.75 million sale price at a charity auction where Putin had previously managed to sell this masterpiece for the puny sum of $1.14 million, but should we be reconsidering Medvedev’s standing as a photographer? After his recent address to the Russian people on the subject, perhaps we should.

Related posts:

1. Moment of sublime strangeness: Medvedev on photography