I was interested to listen to photographer Tom Hunter’s somewhat candid presentation last weekend at the Rhubarb Rhubarb Cultivate seminar held at London College of Communication, where I was also speaking. Hunter graduated from the college in 1994 and has gone on to have a successful career exhibiting at galleries nationally and internationally (including being the first photographer to have an exhibition at the National Gallery, London). He first came to prominence in 1998 after winning the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award with this picture:
Hunter is interesting as his work has often concentrated on a very small geographical area, that of his home in East London and particularly Hackney, while his subjects have tended to be members of the community of travellers he knows as neighbours and friends. (It’s worth noting the work of Stephen Gill whose photographs have also extensively explored the area of Hackney). I’ve not got time to discuss Hunter’s work, instead here are a selection of photographs from various series he’s made in Hackney over the past few years, along with links to some articles and audio interviews.
These two images are from the series Empty Towerblock, which Hunter describes as: “The empty tower block stands as a symbol of a paradigm failure in UK social policy: the Dystopia and ultimate waste of castle-in-the-air housing projects which were scrapped and abandoned. They are all the more poignant a choice for imaging, given that tower blocks were originally meant to be a dream (Utopian) solution to the issue of ‘decent’ housing.”
These last three images are taken from his series, Life and Death in Hackney, which he describes as: “More overtly than other series, these images convey a bleak outlook, but one which is familiar and fair, and broadly resonant with today’s society. Subjects are shown in soporific states, or role-playing ‘death scenes’, and these are located in overgrown fields, wasteland, or graveyards….This assists the ethereal, or ‘other-worldly’, quality to the frames as the wild, untouched-looking country found in Hackney seems apocryphal and ‘dream-like’, despite its contemporary reality.”
Hunter’s show at the National Gallery, Living in Hell and Other Stories, took as its subject the lives of the ordinary residents of Hackney, as reported in local newspapers. These often startling stories are told in carefully staged photographs derived from Renaissance paintings. You can read an article about the work by Martin Herbert here.
You can watch a slideshow and audio tour of the National Gallery show on the Guardian’s website here. While James Lomax discusses the exhibition on his blog here.
British photographer Paul Graham is shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography prize, which is currently on show at the Photographers’ Gallery, London (also shortlisted are Emily Jacir, Tod Papageorge and Taryn Simon). I’ve already done a post about his work (see A1- Great North Road here), but just wanted to highlight an article in today’s Guardian where he talks about his best shot.
Graham has been nominated for the prize for his publication a shimmer of possibility. Inspired by Chekhov’s short stories, it comprises 12 individual books, each volume a photographic short story of everyday life in today’s America. Most of these books contain small sequences of images, such as a man smoking a cigarette while he waits for a bus in Las Vegas, or a walk down a street in Boston on an autumn afternoon.
I agree with the picture that he’s selected (Pittsburgh -Man cutting grass), which is actually one of a sequence of photographs he took on the first evening of a two-and-a-half-year trip around America, starting in 2004. As he explains “I was just travelling with no particular purpose, taking photos along the way. This was in the car park in front of the motel where I was staying, and there was this guy cutting the grass of an entire huge field with a very loud old push-mower. He saw me and lifted his hand at one point, but he didn’t really care. So I kept on taking pictures, with the sun shining directly into the camera. (It’s lovely to do everything that Kodak tell you not to.)”
There is something quite magical about this image. It’s beautiful in the ordinaryness of the event, which has been captured as the rain falls and a burst of sunlight breaks through the clouds, illuminating the scene with sparks of colour and light. You can read Graham’s comments on the image here.
In her continuing series on photography books, you can read Liz Jobey’s review of Graham’s a shimmer of possiblityhere. It is a very original publication and in my opinion the series of photographs works much better in book form than they do on the gallery wall.
The Deutsche Börse exhibition runsuntil the 12th April, with the winner announced on 25 March 2009.
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“The objective history of England doesn’t amount to much if you don’t believe in it, and I don’t, and I don’t believe that anyone in these photographs does either as they face the reality of de-industrialisation in a system which regards their lives as disposable. To the people in these photographs I am superfluous, my life does not depend on their struggle, only my hopes. This is a subjective book about my time in England. I take what isn’t mine and I covet other peoples lives. The photographs can tell you more about me than about what they describe. The book is a fiction about metaphor.” Chris Killip, Foreword to In Flagrante, 1988
In Flagrante jacket cover (First Edition)
I have to admit I’m slightly embarrassed that it’s taken me this long to write a post on what is often described as the most important photobook to come out of England in the 1980s. Better late than never!
In Flagrante by Chris Killip (Secker and Warburg, London 1988) has long been on my list of most wanted photo books, but has always eluded me, mainly thanks to it’s price tag. A first edition currently sells for around £380.00 (and there’s a copy available here if you’re interested). Instead, I’ve just bought a copy of the recently published edition In Flagrante: Books on Books #4 (Errata Editions, 2009), which arrived in the post this morning.
Jacket cover for In Flagrante, Books on Books
Errata Editions’ Books on Books series is an ongoing publishing project dedicated to making rare and out-of-print photography books accessible to photobook enthusiasts. These are not reprints or facsimiles but complete studies of the original books. Each volume in the series presents the entire content, page for page. This edition reproduces the original essay by John Berger and Sylvia Grant (‘Walking Home’) and also includes additional texts by Gerry Badger (‘Dispatches from a War Zone’) and Jeffrey Ladd (‘The Making of In Flagrante’).
Here are some of the sample page layouts from the Errata Edition (which unfortunately have none of the richness of the original):
The publisher notes at the time described In Flagrante as “a book of fifty photographs by one of Europe’s most outstanding and uncompromising photographers. The impact of these images is both immediate and enduring, creating one of the most authoritative and intense bodies of work produced this decade. This view of Britain in the eighties reflects the stark reality of industrial society in decline.”
In Flagrante describes the communities in Northern England that were devastated by the deindustrialisation common to policies carried out by Thatcher and her predecessors starting in the mid-1970s. The book was accompanied by an exhibition at the V&A in London. It’s worth noting that the photographs intially came out of a joint exhibition in 1985 entitled ‘Another Country’, that Killip made with his close friend, the photographer Graham Smith.
Photo-historian and critic Gerry Badger, describes it as “a fully realized photo-book by a British photographer; complex, subtle, allusive. It was in the documentary mode, that is to say, realist in tone, but realism shot through and through with a powerful and insistent personal inflection. For Killip, it achieved a long-term goal to make photography which might be perceived in a literary, cinematic way, with a narrative flow, however oblique, and the work of art was the book itself.†(Quoted in Chris Killip, Phaidon 55).
Christopher David Killip was born on 11 July 1946 in Douglas, Isle of Man. Killip moved to London in 1964 and worked as an assistant to the advertising photographer Adrian Flowers. He soon went freelance, but in 1969 stopped his commercial work to concentrate on the photography that he wanted to do. The inspiration of this is often cited as a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York where he discovered the work of Paul Strand and Walker Evans. Indeed Killip is quoted saying “In the sophistication of the MoMA’s permanent collection I discovered the context for their work. The fact that photography had a relevant, pertinent history” (Interview with Gerry Badger, Books on Books 4).
In 1970 Killip moved back to the Isle of Man, photographing it extensively. Two years later he was commissioned to photograph Bury St Edmunds and Huddersfield, and in 1975 he won a two-year fellowship from Northern Arts to photograph the northeast of England; Creative Camera devoted its entire May issue to this work. During the early 1970s he became the founder, exhibition curator, and advisor at the Side Gallery, Newcastle, and worked as its director from 1977-79.
The photographs for In Flagrante were all made in black and white, on 4×5 film. They hold to the documentary rather than the formalist wing of modernist photography. The book was well received on its publication in 1988, but Killip’s kind of black and white documentation of the underclass was going out of fashion quickly in Britain, as photographers used color to show consumerism and for consciously and explicitly artistic purposes. (Somewhat ironically perhaps, Killip was approached by Pirelli U.K. which thought that he might photograph its tire factory in Burton. The resulting work was published in book form only in 2007 – Pirelli Work, Steidl).
In Killip’s photographs the bleak landscape of the North East becomes an extension of its human subjects, underscoring the harshness of their lives. Some of his most memorable pictures in In Flagrante are taken in the North Yorkshire fishing village of Skinningrove (see above and below). Skinningrove is a fishing village between the Tees conurbation and the picturesque fishing port of Whitby. Badger describes the portrait of Bever as “demonstrating a perhaps muted, but palpable violence. And there is an undercurrent of conflict and threat throughout much of In Flagrante, which make the book’s rare moments of tenderness all the more effective.”
Killip photographed on the Skinningrove foreshore on several occassions over the course of three years, often spending long periods of time getting to know his subjects. Crabs and People (below) is for me, Killip’s most striking and enduring images. Beautiful, disturbing and compositionally brilliant. It’s an image that asks as many questions as it does provide answers.
“Chris Killip is not a sociologist with a camera, nor a historian. He is an artist, a poet, with a compulsion to enter people’s lives and try and make something of them. To understand them perhaps. To share his compulsion with us – undoubtedly. To assume the role of advocate – possibly. Or maybe it is all an attempt to reveal something else, both known and unknown.†Gerry Badger (Quoted in Chris Killip, Phaidon 55).
I’ve been looking around the web for any interviews where Killip discusses his work, but without any success. I did come across this quote where he comments on a photograph by Boris Mikhailov which was included in the Tate Modern’s Street&Studio exhibition.
“I was shocked when I first saw this work, and shocked when I returned to ponder on these slyly referential, snapshot-like photographs, now blown up on the gallery wall. Boris, how apt. This compelling work cannot help but raise the question: what is a photograph and what is its purpose? The self-congratulatory smugness of most photographic offerings has lulled me into a very low level of expectation. The bulk of photographic work produced for galleries, produced for Hollywood, produced for the art scene is geared to an audience. It is self-censored, and its reception (such a strong American concern) is second guessed. No wonder that most of current photography is so devoid of content. I mean, perfectly seriously, who is going to buy Mikhailov’s work? Masterpiece it might be, but who wants to be reminded so forcefully by content that actions always have consequences?”
Killip currently works as Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University in Massachusetts, USA.
There’s an interview with Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins in the current issue of the RPS Journal (March 2009) where Steele-Perkins discusses a retrospective of his work shot in England, which he is currently editing.
Apparently the project will collect material shot during the course of Steele-Perkins’ career, from his student work, to what he is shooting now. “I’ve not been interested in doing retrospective books”, he says, “but I realised I’ve been photographing England for about 40 years. If I’ve got three picture from every year, that’s 120 pictures.”
Looking through this huge body of work, he says, themes emerge of which he was only vaguely aware hitherto. “I’ll probably run it chronologically”, he tells David Land, “because it’s interesting to see a theme re-appearing over time in slightly different ways.”
“This is the first time I’ve looked back. I’m trawling through my old contact sheets, and finding images that haven’t been printed up, that were lost, or put into the Magnum system and forgotten about. It’s interesting, because you forget about the stories you’ve done, but it’s also tedious: you do shoot a lot of muck, and are reminded of all those mediocre pictures you’ve shot.”
The book will published by Northumbria University Press. Hopefully it will include some of these (not mediocre) photographs taken from his previous publications, The Teds (1979, re-published by Dewi Lewis, 2003) and The Pleasure Principle (Cornerhouse, 1995).
Apologies for this unrelated plug, but my Polyarnye Nochi series, which was all shot in and around Russia’s Kola Peninsula, will be exhibited in the upcoming Format Festival in Derby, which officially opens next Thursday 5th March.
The theme this year is PHOTOCINEMA, which is described by curator Louise Clements in the following way:
“From film still to still film the theme for FORMAT09 is positioned in the half-light between these two narrative and technical sensibilities, colliding – fact with fiction, historicism with fantasy, and reality with the cinematic. The festival contains the work of artists who extend the ‘still’ image in time through the use of photo-narrative sequencing, directed or documentary photography and moving image from single still to feature film.”
Unforgiving and dramatic winters have often been regarded as one of Russia’s most defining characteristics. A Russian winter is redolent both of great hardship but also great beauty and for centuries it has been romanticised in the country’s painting, music and cinema. A continuation of my exploration of contemporary Russian society and partly inspired by Russian cinema, Polyarnye Nochi explores the winter landscapes of Northern Russia during a period known as Polar Nights, when the region is shrouded in darkness nearly 24 hours a day. To find out more about the work, you can download an article by the writer Alexandra Lennox, entitled ‘The influence, inspiration and interplay of Simon Robert’s Polyarnye Nochi and Russian cinema,’ here.
This will be the first major exhibition of the series and will be exhibited in the main programme in the Quad Gallery along with work by Hannah Starkey, Muge, Zhang Xiao, Gregory Crewdson, William Eggleston, Cindy Sherman, Jonas Mekas, Eric Baudelaire, David Lynch, Mark Read, Nichola Dove, Bethany Murray, Magnum Cinema, Pang Xuan.
As part of the festival I will be conducting a day’s seminar on 25th March from 10.30am -4.30pm, which is open to all practicing photographers. The seminar will focus on my career development, strategies for realising personal projects, practical advice and portfolio feedback. Then in the evening I’ll be delivering an Artist Talk where I’ll discuss the series and it’s interplay with Russian cinema. It will be followed by a screening of Andrei Zvyagintsev’s superb film The Return (2003).
Both events can be booked through QUAD Box Office on 01332 290606 or by going to the Derby Quad website here.
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Every year the Royal Photographic Society promotes a series of regional lectures, supporting events for members across the UK. The Society have asked me to be this year’s speaker and I will be delivering seven lectures across the country where I’ll be presenting and discussing photographs from Motherland and We English.
If you’re interested in coming along to one of the talks, you can download a pdf with more details here.
The next lectures will be-
Bath, Sunday 8th March
Bovey Tracey, Dorset – Saturday 14th March
West Maling, Kent – Saturday 10th April
Edinburgh, Scotland – Satuday 16th May
East Anglia – Sunday 18th October
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I was at Michael Hoppen Gallery yesterday and had the chance to see the work of Japanese photographer Hiromi Tsuchida. I was particular excited to see a series of exhibition prints from his book Counting Grains of Sand (Published: Tosei-Sha, May 2005).
Born in Fukui Prefecture in 1939 Tsuchida studied engineering before enrolling in the Tokyo College of Photography in 1965 where he was later to return as a professor. He began his career as a publicity photographer for a cosmetics company but quickly decided to become a freelance photographer in 1971. Tsuchida began Counting Grains of Sand in the second half of the 1970s and the series explores how the Japanese people interact and function in a crowd, with each person a ‘grain of sand’. He decided to stop working on the series in 1989, when the ‘crowd to end all crowds’ came to mourn the death of Emperor Hirohito. However, during the 1990s he began work on the series again as he was struck by the shifting dynamic of the crowd in the today’s Japan. Crowds were no longer seas of people but had become a network of small groups that maintained a certain distance from each other.
Tsuchida attempts to express the changes in Japanese culture and society through his work, analyzing the distance within crowds and the clash between tradition and modernity that structures Japanese society. His photographs have been described as “the intersection between the individual and the communal, within the global context of urbanization and consumerism.” And it has been said that his work highlights the “unification brought about by the sacred and the profane within the context of a society with this dual structure. Doing so he captures a universal element that exists outside of time and indifferent to western influences.”
His vivid use of colour give the images an almost hyper-real quality and help convey a sense of claustrophobia while at the same time the crowds seem very ordered.
You can see a few more of Tsuchida’s work on Artnet here.
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“Fay Godwin is one of our best known landscape photographers, a master of scenery in black and white, and incidentally, working out in photography a long-tradition of subtly depicting the politics of the British countryside.†Chris Townsend, Hot Shoe , July 1999
Following on from my recent posts about photographers looking at the politicised nature of the English countryside (Dark Days and Tomorrow We Enter Paradise) I want to turn to the work of noted British photographer Fay Godwin (17 February 1931 – 27 May 2005). A photographer who, having established herself in portraiture, became known for her black and white landscape photographs which often had a political strand. Indeed in later years her photographs became a more overt criticism of the environmental damage and access restrictions imposed on the land, across England.
Influenced by Bill Brandt and Paul Strand, she looks for the narrative in her landscapes, choosing to record man’s relationship with the environment.
“I had no aspirations to become a landscape photographer at all. In fact it was portraiture that was my beginning, I suppose. I have always been a very keen walker, though, and I often took a camera with me on my walks. But I was, and still am, an avid reader and so when I first started I chose to photograph many of the great writers in this country to try and earn a living.” Fay Godwin, 2004
Godwin was self-taught, her interest developed during the 1960s through taking pictures of her young family. Having established herself in literary portraiture, she moved onto publishing her landscape work in a series of walkers’ books (see full list here). In 1978, she received an award from the UK arts council, and her best known exhibition ‘Land’ was shown at the Serpentine Gallery in London, 1985, and is regarded by many as the finest study of British landscape ever published setting new standards in British landscape photography.
While I appreciate Godwin’s landscape photographs, the images I’m really drawn to are those which present a dry humour and, much like Tony Ray-Jones, a keen eye for the quietly absurd. Here are some of my favourite photographs, which can be found in the ‘snaps’ section of her website:
From 1979 Godwin started experimenting in colour, which eventually led to a deliberate attempt to move out of the black and white landscape genre. This was helped through a Fellowship at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, (Bradford 1987/8) culminating in an exhibition ‘Bradford in Colour’. During the early 1990s, Godwin’s eventual move to colour close-ups was widely misinterpreted as a necessity due to failing health, rather than creative progression. Godwin’s own view was: “Because in a dreary British way, I had been pigeon-holed as a black and white photographer and at my age it was not permissible to move on.”
“I’ve always been interested in our relationship with the land. There is so much of great beauty and historical interest, but when I look at the British Isles I am also angered and saddened by the relentless butchering of our heritage by money-grabbing corporations.” Fay Godwin, 2004
In 2001 Godwin was honoured with a major retrospective, ‘Landmarks’ at the Barbican Centre, in London. Landmarks went on to tour internationally. An associated book was published by Dewi Lewis.
“I don’t get wrapped up in technique and the like. I have a simple rule and that is to spend as much time in the location as possible. You can’t expect to take a definitive image in half an hour. It takes days, often years. And in fact I don’t believe there is such a thing as a definitive picture of something. The land is a living, breathing thing and light changes its character every second of every day. That’s why I love it so much.†Fay Godwin, 2004
Interestingly I came across this photograph by Godwin:
You can read a longer biography of Godwin here and the last interview she gave with David Corfield for Practical Photography in December 2004 here (where her quotes are taken from above).
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