Amsterdam-Utrecht-Arles

I have been somewhat busy over the last few weeks and realised that I have not posted much new work, or in fact much at all! I must apologies for this, but I have been working on something which has taken much time, but is very, very exciting indeed.

It all came together yesterday in my initial meeting over in Utrecht, a place only 30 minutes outside Amsterdam, with beautiful architecture, wonderful culture and without all the tourist! I went to have a meeting with Kummer & Herrman, a wonderfully conceptual design company, producing amazing books like WassinkLundgren's "Toyko Tokyo" and working on exhibition catalogues for the likes of Paul McCarthy and working on many other intriguing projects. If you haven't yet guessed what I was doing over there....... here it is, I am producing a book!

The book will be about the series "The Photograph as Contemporary Art" and is going to be fantastic. I can't divulge much now, but watch this space for updates, imagery, meetings and more importantly launch dates and times!

Now after that excitement, tomorrow I am off to Arles. Hope to see many of you out there in the glorious weather and you might even get a little glimpse of what is to come visually with regards to my forthcoming book.

http://www.kummer-herrman.nl/

Non Conforme

So as the hot, sunny weather continues it reminds me of where I am headed at the end of this week, to the south of France for Les Recontres D'Arles Photographie - I can't wait! The 2011 edition is titled Non Conforme, (Uncertified) and deals with the changing perspectives of photography, with key exhibitions like "From Here on" curated by Martin Parr, Erik Kessels, Clement Cheroux, Joan Fontcuberta and Joachim Schmid. There is a host of great events and many, many exhibitions, but something I am very much looking forward to are the events by FOAM Museum, as they bring their 10th Anniversary Project "What's Next" to Arles, along with the beautiful weather, the wonderful wine and fantastic company!

See more here: http://www.rencontres-arles.com/A11/Home

Boo Ritson

As it is such a lovely summery day today, it felt appropriate to draw your attention to something I did a few years back as I just found the print the other day again. The image above is called "Pin-Up" (it's me) and is by the artist Boo Ritson, I am sure many of your have heard about this artist but if you have not here is a little bit of information about her process.

"Boo Ritson depicts characters and still lifes drawn from her own imagined narratives merged with borrowed Americana. For each piece she paints her subject in a thick emulsion and then has the scene photographed whilst the paint is still wet. The resulting image sits somewhere between painting, sculpture, performance and photography."

Being covered head to toe in emulsion paint is quite an experience, something that was very fun and odd all at the same time. Her process uses photography to record, capturing those moments just before everything is washed away; I think it's a very interesting take on the medium. More information about Boo Ritson and other works can be found here: http://www.poppysebire.com/artists/Boo_Ritson.htm#

Transcript

The image above is by Jeremy Hutchison and is titled "Transcript, 2008" a performance that is every word he said on 21/01/2007. I found this body of work after I saw Hutchison's piece "Blown to Brits, News of the World, 20th March 2011" at Art Sensus. I wanted to find out a bit more about the artist as the approach and theories behind his work, I found to be very insightful and inspiring. Trained in linguistics, his relationship with text is deep routed and provides an intellectualism, at times with a hint of humour. This body of work I found to be very stunning and other projects worth mentioning are "Wet and Wild, 2009", "The English Tourist and the Oslo Agreement, 2009" and "Katrina, 2008" which is a image caught on a 110 film camera, found buried in dirt after Hurrican Katrina.

See more of Hutchison's work here, http://www.jeremyhutchison.com/index.html

History Painting Now

This image above is "Muzzle Flash, 2001" by Sarah Pickering and was part of a group show curated by Nick Hackworth, "History Painting Now" at Art Senus which closed last Saturday 4th June. I attended a curator’s talk on the closing day where four of the seven artists were present and discussions took place around the relationship between Art and Power, the shifting boundaries of the photographic medium and the "war of imagery."

If you didn't get to the talk, or see the exhibition, below is part of a text about the exhibition written by Nick Hackworth. It really was a great show and the works were beautiful, bringing forth very interesting questions about the role of photography within warfare and how disentanglement, a discontenting with the 'traditional' methods provides much more.

"In History Painting Now, seven artists (two of them combined in a duo) based in London and Paris are brought together. Their work addresses war and weaponry and their depiction. Tellingly and intelligently, the relationship of all the works to both power and what might be very crudely be termed ‘the real’ is elliptical, evasive even. Were an equivalent group of artists assembled two centuries ago, when History Painting was the preeminent cultural expression of the ideological requirements of the nascent Nation State, the gallery would be full of heroic depictions of encounters during the Napoleonic Wars.

Here, now, more than a century after Modernism re-cast the role of the artist -from a servile handmaiden articulating the instrumental demands of societies’ elites, to a heroically subjective and critical consciousness adrift in a hostile world - instead of the figurative and the idealized we are presented with abstraction, negation and self-conscious artificiality. Instead of the illusion of proximity and presence offered in another age by History Painting and today by the media, our mediated distance is underlined by the work.

In doing so these works acknowledge that the only space in which Culture can contend with Power without being instantly overwhelmed is the realm of thought, in which, after all, ideology is constructed. In not overreaching themselves, in being in awe of Power, which is necessarily terrible, these works allow that which is not seen, that which remains un-depicted to remain the monster that it is."

http://www.artsensus.com/artists/group-show/exhibitions/history-painting-now.html

Contacts

As the months fly by, I continue with my project "Little gifts" and realised that I have been making much imagery but haven't really been sharing or showing anyone. The image above is one of the 11 contact sheets that I have from shooting the objects that remain. These contacts have become more interesting than the individual shots on the film of roll as they document a repetitiveness, an obsessiveness of photographing the same objects time and time again, trying to get that perfect shot, when what it is I am looking for is lost. I feel this documented process is something very revealing and should be shown in its basic form. I still need to finalise this part of the project but there is something very powerful about photography being seen as a way to think, to grieve and to process.

Films

"Fuji Fujicolor Reala, 100asa, Troubled Land, 1984, from the series Films, 2011" pictured above is a new body of work by Paul Graham currently showing at Anthony Reyolds Gallery, but it does close on 4th June, so it's the last week to see this extraordinary body of work.

Graham's series "Films" is rather simple in its process but excels in aesthetics by questioning the very structure that makes the medium what it is and has been. The press release explains, "While examining his work of the past 30 years for the major survey exhibition arriving at the Whitechapel Gallery this month, Graham became enraptured with the base material of his craft and began to reflect upon the physical substance with which his images were made. Scanning the negatives for the exhibition, he began also to scan the blank film ends and unexposed frames from each body of work. What Graham gathered in the process he saw as a 'negative retrospective' of his practice. These luscious and beguiling abstract images are nothing more than greatly enlarged images of raw emulsion, the colour dye clouds formed in the exposure and development of film."

The images are presented in a small, classic manner that reflects the beauty of the imagery and the nostalgic element to the work. This series is very beautiful and has very successfully brought together nostalgia and abstraction in a highly considered and thoughtful examination of the medium.

http://www.anthonyreynolds.com/home.htm

The Bunkier Sztuki

One of the many highlights at the opening weekend of Photomonth Krakow, but one that really resonates in my mind was the Alias. Survey exhibition at The Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery where Broomberg & Chanarin gave a talk about the concept behind the curation. What was very interesting was the reasoning behind the use of installation shots instead of the original pieces for all the artists’ works in the exhibition. Originally from the constraints of budgetary requirements, came this new use of imagery, installation photography being propelled to a new level, seen worthy as a gallery exhibit in its own right.

Each piece was a copy of the original. None of the artists in the exhibition existed; rather the works existed as copies of the fictitious , anonymous, experimental and alternative personas that each artist in the exhibition had wished to inhabit to produce work outside the realm of reality. As you walked through the exhibition you had a little book detailing the biographies of the artists, all of which were fictitious. This itself could be seen as an exhibit as when you viewed the pieces you spent much of the time reading the text, trying to work out what was truthful, or even more interestingly, knowing nothing was truthful but believeing what you read. One image, which really demonstrated this beautifully for me, was a piece showing Gillian Wearing’s exhibition at Maureen Paley I believe. This installation shot, blown up to over 60 inches and printed as a poster then installed into the gallery perfectly posed the questions; what makes a photograph photography, who is the artist – does it matter, what’s the notion of the original and where is the medium headed?

For me, this survey, incomplete as it said it was has propelled forward some very interesting and exciting concepts surrounding the notion of what constitutes the medium in this changing time. Broomberg & Chanarin have created an opening, a space whereby questions that need answering, but are hesitantly suggested, or more commonly not mentioned at all, come into play. Interesting times, there is a space here, I wonder who takes it to the stage.

Read more here: http://bunkier.art.pl/en

Miesiąca Fotografii w Krakowie 2011

So I am back from Krakow, in fact I have been back for a week now but before I posted about my trip I really needed some time to digest everything that was seen, viewed and experienced. I am not too sure were to start really, so much happened and what a trip it was, but this is a good place to start, our location and our locals!

The apartment choice was fantastic, being right next to The Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery and a couple of minutes from the main square. The festival bureau was located just behind, in a stunning building on Sw. Tomasza Street positioned over a great local called Cafe Camelot. We spent many an afternoon and evening drinking and eating in these beautiful places, taking in the Polish culture, discussing photography and if everyone would benefit from having an Alias of their own.

The opening weekend was packed full of Alias openings from Friday to Sunday we walked around the city entering numerous galleries and museums, taking in the stunning city scenery while we walked. From George and Patricia Beacher, Jack of Surprises to Plantinga on the first night to Lester B. Morrison, Neville Lister and Not in Order of Appearance finalising on Sunday afternoon. Each opening proved to be another mindful, extraordinarily well curated exhibit, providing visually exciting uses of the medium alongside imaginative biographies of nonexistent artists.

Keep up to date with the festival here: http://www.photomonth.com/index.php/en/page/1/news.html

Alias

So only a few days now until the opening weekend of Photomonth in Krakow 2011, guest curated by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. I am sure by now you will have seen all the publicity about this years theme, "Alias", if you haven't yet seen what everyone is talking about then here is a little piece from the press release that will surely get you excited and inspired!

"Could it think, the heart would stop beating". Fernando Pessoa

"Twenty-three writers (of fiction, fact and medical history) were each commissioned to create a text describing an invented persona, which was then assigned to a visual artist to inhabit. The work that accompanies these texts is the result of each individual artist’s residency in their fictitious character.

It’s an experiment that was set up to fail, because it shouldn’t be that easy to stop being yourself; to break with your own particular political and ethical concerns. Yet most of the artists we approached bravely took up the challenge.

‘We never disembark from ourselves,’ complained the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet. We wanted to give our contributors the chance to do precisely this: to disembark.

The Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s fictional anthology, Nazi Literature in The Americas, showed just how helpful the fictitious persona could be when exploring moral and political territory too terrifying to explore honestly in our own skin." Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, April 2011

Artists and writers include to name but a few, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Polly Braden, Jeremy Deller, Roe Etheridge, Gabriel Orozco, Clare Strand and Gordon MacDonald, Brown & Bri, David Campany, Fernando Pessoa, Ella Saltmarshe, Jennifer Higgie, Sean O’Toole, Helen deWitt, Ivan Vladislavic, Brad Zellar and so many more.

I am heading out on Thursday evening for the opening weekend, so I am busy finalising my plans and travel arrangments, I can't wait it is going to be an amazing trip. I hope to see many people out there too.

http://www.photomonth.com/index.php/en/page/1/aktualnosci.html

Film Still

Above is a still taken from the film I made commemorating my dearest friends death on 21st April last year. What I filmed was simple, the dawning of the 21st one-year on from 00:00 every hour for 10 minutes until 12:10. I simply filmed the light on the speech I wrote for his funeral, something that has been very intrinsic in this process. The film documents the quiet, sometimes silence of time passing from darkness into light.

It was a very important process for me to go through this time period, one year on, connecting with a time where a momentous decision was made and through the act of filming, capture, connect and ultimately share an experience I was unable to alter.

I have 130 minutes of footage to edit down to 13 minutes, so the journey begins now.

Paul Graham

I visited the Whitechapel Gallery this afternoon to see the new Paul Graham show, "Paul Graham: Photographs 1981 - 2006" and after the previous John Stezaker show, this had a lot to live up to, but of course it did. The exhibition brings together many bodies of work, and is a truly delightful insight into Graham's eyes, his world and his work over the last twenty-five years.

The Whitechapel describes the exhibition as "Graham’s photographs transform the banality of a social security office or a suburban lawn into compelling scenes. Yet for all the immediacy of his saturated colours and large formats, these pictures are also about what cannot be seen. ‘I realised that concealment… has run through… my work, from the landscape of Northern Ireland, and the unemployed tucked away in backstreet offices, to the burdens of history swept under the carpet in Europe or Japan. Concealment of our turmoil from others, from ourselves even’."

For me, the work that deeply inspires and touches me is the series "A shimmer of possibility" not only are the images and installation stunning, but the books produced by Steidl are expectional. This body of work brings together the banaiity of everyday life, interjected with moments of the sublime. This really is a great exhibition and is definitely worth a visit, it finishes on the 19th June 2011.

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/paul-graham-photographs-1981-2006

Image copyright Paul Graham, courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery.