Having a LAF

Terrible title... couldn't resist though...

Last night I went to visit the London Art Fair. Based in the Business Design Centre in Islington, it is a chance for contemporary art galleries to show off their wares, many of which I found uninspiring. I found the people more interesting than the art; gallerists are a strange breed, and many of the punters were those sort who have too much money to know what to with, and think they are cool by investing it in art.

And I couldn't help noticing a curious lack of photography features in this type of gallery. Is the art vs photography question still burning? Do photographs have a place in a fine art gallery? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I can speculate... I think that, due to the ubiquity of photography in our day to day lives, people are so familiar with the medium that they find it difficult to place a value on it. Add to this the fact that we are not sure how the new digital papers are going to stand the test of time, and the fact that photographs can be reproduced over and over, thus giving the photographer the possibility to re-print and make more money at any time, de-valuing the work in question, and we have many reasons why collectors are dubious. It seems that it is only the Gurskys and the Shermans of this world who will ever sell. And yet photographers are asking more and more for their work.

©Aliki Braine

But there is a kind of counter attack occuring in the shape of online print sales, which was outlined by Miranda Gavin in the current edition of BJP. It seems that, over the last few years, it is online galleries which are selling photographs, and at really reasonable prices. Troika Editions (who represent Aliki Braine, above) and Contact Editions in the UK for example. And it was nice to see Troika present at the fair, making their mark amongst the over-priced, almost corporate world of contemporary art.

In addition to all this commercialism was an excellent curated exhibition called Photo50. It brought together many famous photographers, including the wonderful Helen Chadwick. The highlight for me, however was a photographer who I had never heard of before...Scarlett Hooft Graafland. Her images are humorous, surreal and beautiful...

"A very jolly show" as my friend Leila put it... and she was right. It's not often that's the case these days...

Image of the week #2

Yesterday I started shooting for my Retro Girls project again... and had the pleasure of Lena Weber from The Vintage Guide to London in front of my lens...

Image of the week #1

Another new year's resolution - to post an image a week on here, each Monday. A good exercise for me! 

Taken in Lausanne, 31.10.10, on a Mamiya 6

A New Year, a New(ish) Blog...

Happy New Year all! I do wish all my readers all the best for 2011.

Here, I will strive to be still more and more active with regular posts on my thoughts on photography. In order to give me a structure of some sort, each month I will give myself a theme to write to... let's see how long I can keep that up!

For the month of January, I would like to start with the theme of pop-up studios. Partly because the end of the month sees the first anniversary of my own pop-up in Brixton Market, but also because I spent the last day of 2010 in an exhibition of Irving Penn's street portraits - a sort of pop-up studio in itself. I was in Lausanne, at the wonderful Musee de l'Elysee; the first time I've ever been, can you believe it! A Swiss-ess with a mother born and bred in the city and I only get to visit this famous photography institution at the ripe old age of 31...

It really is a wonderful gallery. Set in a beautiful old mansion on the banks of Lac Leman, it has four floors of exhibition space, a well-stocked bookshop, and has the most comprehensive photographic archive in Switzerland.

And the exhibition, too, was wonderful. In 1950 and 1951, Irving Penn photographed people with "small trades"; firemen and shoe-shiners for example, who often worked the streets. He would invite them into his studio to be photographed, with a prop which marked their trade. The work started as a personal project on the streets of London, but soon it was published by Vogue and he did the same thing in Paris and New York. What was most interesting for me about the exhibition was seeing the same trade depicted in each city; the differences in uniform, in prop, in attitude. And with that, Penn's own observations about the different nationalities:

"En général, les Parisiens doubtaient que nous ferions exactement ce que nous leur avions dit. Ils pensaient que quelque chose de louche allait arriver, mais ils arrivaient au studio plus au moins comme convenu - motivés par le cachet. Les Londoniens étaient différents des Français: etre photographié en tenue de travail était pour eux la chose la plus logique au monde. Ils arrivaient au studio toujours a l'heure et se présentaient devant l'appareil photo avec un sérieux et une fierté qui étaient particulierement touchants. Des trois, les Americains étaient le groupe le plus imprévisible. En dépit de nos recommandations, quelques un arriverent aux séances changés de pied en cap, rasés et parfois meme dans leurs costumes sombres du dimanche, convaincus de faire lur premier pas vers Hollywood"

"In general, Parisians wondered whether we were going to do exactly what we sad we were going to do. They thought that something dodgy was going to happen, but they arrived at the studio more or less as requried - morivated by the prestige. Londoners were different to the French; to be photographed in their work clothes was, for them, the most natural thing in the world. They arrived at the studio on time and presented themselves in front of the camera with a seriousness and pride which was particularly touching. Of the three, the Americans were the most unpredictable. In spite of our recommendations, some arrived to the sessions completely changed from head to toe, shaven and even sometimes in their sombre Sunday best, convinced that this was their first step towards Hollywood." (text quoted from the panel in the exhibition; my translation)

 

The exhibition also included some vintage copies of Vogue, showing the work as it was published in the three countries, and Penn's first monograph, Moments Preserved, published in 1960.



So all in all a great way to end 2010 - and funny that it was just after I had mentioned that the Penn exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was one of my favourites of the year. A great inspiration and a great way to begin my theme on pop-ups... more to come!

My pick of exhibitions 2010

2010 has been a great year for photography shows. Some of them I have reviewed on here, but many of the great ones I have seen I haven't mentioned, most probably cos something else got in the way.

A highlight for me was the Camille Silvy exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. A studio portrait photographer in London in the mid nineteenth century, Silvy was renowned for taking exquisite portraits of the aristocracy for cartes de visites etc. The beautiful thing about the exhibition, though, was his early work of French landscapes, with detail as to how he printed them. Often using 3 negatives combined (each exposed for different areas of the scene) his printing techniques were key; a reminder of the craft of photography, which has disappeared in this digital age. The exhibition was full of information and rich in social history; Silvy was a prolific photographer and businessman, and I can't believe I had never heard of him. Sadly, he suffered from a bipolar disorder (which he believed was brought on by the darkroom chemicals) and the last thirty years of his life he spent in hospitals and convalesent homes.



Another inspiring show, also at the National Portrait Gallery, was Iriving Penn Portraits. A well known portraitist, what I found fascinating was his incredibly simple approach to studio work. In contrast to the fashion of studio photography at that time, which was all dramatic sets and backdrops, Penn would photograph his sitters in his empty studio, just how it was; complete with cigarette butts and litter on the floor. In one series, he places his sitter as if wedged in an acute corner, providing opportunities of performance and self-expression from the sitter. Due to the receding line of the walls, the eye is drawn to the subject; any gesture is exaggerated, and small gesture emphasised. A simple trick, to such great effect.

Duchess of Windsor, © Irving Penn

There have been other great shows... Sophie Calle at the Whitechapel Gallery, Neeta Madahar at Purdy Hicks, Stephen Gill at Brighton Biennale. One of my new year's resolutions is to write up all the shows I see, be it good or bad... if only for my sake of recording what I have seen!

Superhero Grandma

I have just come across this work, and I just had to share it...

These are photographs taken by Sacha Goldberger, of his 91 year old Hungarian grandmother. Noticing that she seemed lonely and a little depressed, he proposed that he take photographs of her in outrageous costumes and poses as a way of cheering her up. And so evolved the character of Super Mamika (Mamika means grandmother in Hungarian).

The photographs are technically brilliant, and succeed in creating a narrative around this humorous superhero. And apparently Grandma got so in character she just couldn't stop being photographed! It's so nice to see some fun photography...

Based in France, Sacha recently had an exhibition at Wanted Paris. His website can be seen here.

Little furry objects make me smile

Gosh it's been a long time since I last posted... November was a quiet month, and I put my mind to more personal matters (such as getting my bathroom re-done, which has the knock on effect that I can't continue shooting my current project because the room I use as a studio now looks more like an architectural rescue place. The whole project is now on hold til the New Year).

But I did have the honour of being a judge at the LCC MA Photography final exhibition. This is with my Photofusion hat on - each year Photofusion offers a prize to a graduate from the LCC MA course. I went to judge it this year with Director and fellow photographer Gina Glover; I must admit that work in MA shows tends to get a little repetitive, but there was one piece of work which was unlike any I had seen before.

Perhaps Finally Alone is a series of photographs of unidentifiable furry objects on plinths, set against wildly patterned backdrops. There is a playful exploration of textures, colours, and an uncertainty of what we are looking at. In some images, the furry object is very definately an animal; one can detect a tail, or some ears. In others, we realise we are looking at a human head of hair, or the plinth is a woman's shoulders. This play on what we are looking at challenges the viewer, and asks all sorts of questions about the nature of a photograph. It is a quirky, humourous series which made me smile... the photographer is Elisa Noguera, and the whole series can be seen on her website.