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.

Archiving & Ordering

As I continue to make my new body of work, new things are being archived and ordered into the series. As the process continues and the grief changes so to does the work. Now one year on, I feel that these receipts should be photographed and added to the collection/ archive of objects. They span nearly seven months and represent much talking and analysis of the circumstances surrounding my grief. Each one is numbered and dated and of which I have twenty-three of them.

As the series evolves I am beginning to see this process as an ever-growing archive, of which an appendix seems the most appropriate form of cataloguing all the objects. Each one feels like it needs numbering and ultimately closing and putting away.

Winner Announced

Jim Goldberg has been awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2011 in an award ceremony held at Ambika P3 Gallery last night. Jim was presented with the £30,000 award by broadcaster and critic Miranda Sawyer for this exhibition "Open Sea." A friend who was there last night said Jim was very shocked and extremely humbled by the judge’s decision.

"Jim Goldberg’s series Open See documents the experiences of refugee, immigrant and trafficked populations who travel from war torn, socially and economically devastated countries to make new lives in Europe. Originating from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, these ‘new Europeans’ have met violence and brutality as well as hope and liberation in their new homes.

Merging Polaroids, video, text, ephemera and large and medium format photographs, Goldberg employs his varied and experimental approaches to photographic storytelling to reflect on issues of migration and the conditions for desiring escape."

Although I wanted Elad Lassry to win, I do feel that in light of the recent events, Jim Goldberg is a very deserving winner. He produced work that documents stories of suffering and puts himself in places that others wouldn't or couldn't. He tells and shows us a tale in an exciting photographic way we wouldn't have otherwise seen or known.

I would like to add, after hearing about the tragic death of Tim Hetherington last week; the entire photography industry was shocked and saddened by the news as we had lost a great master in his field and my deepest sympathies go out to his family and friends in such hard times. He will never be forgotten and he inspired so many.

http://www.photonet.org.uk/index.php?pid=4&show=28

http://www.timhetherington.org/condolences/

In Loving Memory

In loving memory of my dearest friend, one year on tomorrow, the 21st April. I will never forget you and will love you dearly forever.

Time Passing

Last Saturday I visited the Hayward Gallery to see the The British Art Show, which was in its final days, it closed on Sunday 17th April. There were a couple of things I had been interested in seeing but nothing more so than Christian Marclay's "The Clock." For anyone who has not heard about this piece, "The Clock' is constructed out of moments in cinema when time is expressed or when a character interacts with a clock, watch or just a particular time of day. Marclay has excerpted thousands of these fragments and edited them so that they flow in real time" White Cube. This piece is fantastic, it truly is a craftsmanship of genius.

As you enter the room and take a seat, the film has been continuously playing. You enter at a certain time, I did at 14:32 and watch the sequences of film shots perfectly edited together. The time passes and with every second matched to real time you almost become part of the film, watching the time pass as the time watches you. Certain times have a crescendo, others have nothing at all, but what is wonderful is that for those minutes that you sit watching this film, your perception of time gets distorted. I left feeling like I had been in there for hours, but knowing that I had only been over 30 minutes! Brilliant.

This really is a stunning piece of cinema, wonderfully put together and amazingly produced, I could of watched the entire 24 hours and feel sorry I missed that opportunity on the 5th and 6th of March at the Hayward. If you haven't seen it, keep looking because I am sure it will be playing again in another gallery, another country soon.

http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/cm/

Demand, Ethridge, Goldberg or Lassry?

Today I took a trip over to Baker Street to see the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize at Westminister University. Firstly what a great exhibition space they have there, it reminded me a little of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, just without the graffiti, skaters and the Parisian culture - brilliant all the same.

As you walk into the space you are immediately faced with Thomas Demand's "Heldenorgel, 2009" against panels of wallpaper. This towering structure, in both physical and content terms dominates the room. I am, and have been a fan of Demand's work but felt a little cold after this exhibit, I felt the space could of taken more, another piece would of added just a little bit more warmth and given a greater understanding when viewing Demand's work.

After Demand's you pan across the room to see an installation of Jim Goldberg's series "Open Sea." Under the stairs are four video pieces playing at once, pauses of black interrupt and a burst of voices grows then fades. The Polaroids are beautiful and the installation of different sized, framed imagery is stunning. An added bonus, is a A1 sheet detailing objects from the project which you are encouraged to take away with you. This is the only show I have seen out of the four and I felt that the curation at P3 was superior to the original at The Photographers' Gallery, maybe it's space that let it down before.

Then in a smaller side room were both Ethridge and Lassry, where the works almost merge into one. For me, this was a real shame, I had hoped that the two artists would be separated, providing both bodies of imagery with more space to breath. Nether-less I was very pleased with what I saw.

Ethridge's playful boundary blurring examines important questions about photography and its positioning within contemporary art and culture. Juxtaposing commercial work with fine art imagery, he uses the medium to question the very nature of what the medium is and can be, something which is extremely important for the future of photography.

Lastly, Elad Lassry's photographs and 16 mm film projections. The size of these images is wonderful, they are small-scale and really invite the audience to 'look' at the photograph. Collages, overtly plastic-like imagery is so familiar, yet you view in a different way, you see through the banal and into what constitutes an image. The film projections add a new dimension, the 16 mm format is perfect as the imperfections of the film are played out in a continuos humming, as we watch colours, patterns and people pass from one side of the frame to the other.

For me, considering the point at which we are at with Photography, the important questioning that is needed and is taking place the winner is Elad Lassry. I feel he is really producing work that examines the very nature of what Photography is and can be. He bridges the gap between stills and film and examines fundamentally what it is to 'look' in an age where we see millions of images everyday. Let's wait and see!

Image copyright Elad Lassry, "Burmese Mother, Kittens, 2008."

Automatic

As I continue with my new body of work "Little Gifts" it evolves softly with new elements being added in all the time. I have been working on a few textual pieces over the last three weeks and have only felt ready now, to upload an example of what they look like. The pieces of text are automatic writing, pieces of text which simply express my thoughts as and when I write them. They are raw, unedited and honest and at times disclose my deepest thoughts and all the emotions that are brought up through that. They are written on an old typewriter, the sound, motion and action of this feels so right for the content of this series. I have already produced 6 and will continue to do so, as and when it feels right.

Image copyright Melinda Gibson 2011.

And So It Ends

And so it ends. The last photomontages are made and the series "The Photograph as Contemporary Art" is finalised with 33 unique pieces and what a journey it has been. The images above, from left to right are "Photomontage XXXI, (taken from pages 29, 72, 88.)" , "Photomontage XXXII, (taken from pages 109, 120, 218.)" and "Photomontage XXX, (taken from pages 37, 42, 46.)"

I would like to take this opportunity to wholehartedly thank all the photographers whose images are published in Charlotte Cotton's book and especially to the artists whose images I have used in the 33 pieces, I couldn't have made such a sucessful body of work without your work - Thank You!

Expert Visions

Follow the debate with new visions from Foam's Expert Meeting held last Saturday 19th March. New videos and thoughts available by some of the leading contemporaries, from Fred Ritchin, Laurel Ptak to Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin's presentation at the meeting and discussions with Charlotte Cotton and Lisa Oppenheim about the Ideal Insititution.

This really is a fantastic project, putting forward very important ideas and notions regarding Photography and where it is/ can head in our ever changing, ever developing future.

Find more here: http://www.foam.org/whatsnext