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Paolo Pellegrin gave fashion magazine NOWNESS this brief interview.
Pellegrin, “My working outfit is very casual: jeans, a shirt, documentary photographer shoes and a jacket. When we meet in these godforsaken places, we all look alike with our Timberlands, our scarves and jackets with lots of pockets.”
I guess I’m laughing because the question reminds me of Peter Kay’s “What yer wearin’ on the plane?” (Youtube clip at 6:32)
Pellegrin also describes fashion as “important aspect of man”, loves Tarkovsky, wants to be a Replicant and nevers fails to close his trips with an airport coffee.
ON THE ‘TO DO LIST’
I am going to contact Pellegrin and ask about Guantanamo. I think we need to be discussing Guantanamo again … and we should also be talking more about the US “Black Site” prisons, beginning with Bagram in Afghanistan. More to come.
Polaroid 636 Close-Up
The ever diligent DLK Collection reminded us recently of what is likely the final chapter in the Polaroid Collection – its dispersal and the auction of its individual parts. DLK tell us of Ansel Adams’ donated time and prints to a collection he thought destined for a museum. The intention and the assets have been devoured by greed. Allow me to defer to DLK;
“The whole sordid story, with its corporate buyers, Ponzi schemes, legal wranglings, bankruptcy proceedings, and angry artists has been faithfully investigated and recorded by esteemed critic A.D. Coleman in the past year and a half on his blog, Photocritic International (here). While the rest of the media generally ignored the Polaroid story, Coleman has produced 19 meticulously researched posts covering its many facets, with particular attention paid to tracking down where all the pictures have gone. It’s well worth the time to read through the entire series to see how this drama has unfolded over the past months.”
Bang on! Anyone interested in the “sordid affair” absolutely should check out A.D.Coleman’s coverage. He has pursued the criminal acts and legal gymnastics with tenacity. I admire Coleman’s work as much as I am aghast at the details of the case – a lot.
'Untitled', from the series Farewell in Labrador, 2010 by Kurt Tong
Kurt Tong‘s work is being plugged by HeyHotShot. The image above reminded me of Stanley Greene‘s image from his Shadows of Change essay about climate change in Greenland.
©2009 Stanley Greene/NOOR
Reading this was like finding the solution to a problem I never knew existed.
There exist hundreds of catalogues detailing photographs exhibited in the Victorian era and shortly after – such examples being Photographs Exhibited in Britain 1839-1865 and Exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society 1870-1915. These catalogues (and now databases that mirror the information of the catalogues) provide information to photographs, but crucially no photographic image. It is presumed these photographs exist somewhere.
Likely some of these AWOL photographs are in private ownership, universities and museums. The recent digitisation of many of these types of collections has transformed the photographs into newly-available data for comparison against the catalogues of descriptions.
CRUNCHING DATA
Professor Stephen Brown and Professor Robert John, of De Montfort University, UK, are investigating a form of computational intelligence known as fuzzy logic to see if it can be used to match catalogue entries to images online.
According to Professor John, the software can “make decisions much more quickly than humans and it is not restricted to a simple ‘match’/’no match’ answer.”
Professor Brown describes example issues the software hopes to negotiate:
“Some of the records in the catalogues are rather vague. For instance, you might have the name, but the only address given is ‘London’. If a photograph is then found with the same name but the photographer’s address is given as ‘Blackheath’ then is that the same person? It could well be but further examination is needed. Some photos were exhibited more than once over different years, and that’s fine as long as the same details are recorded for both, but very often this isn’t the case. It wasn’t uncommon for a photographer to sell or loan prints to other people who then exhibit that work under their own name, not claiming to be the photographer, just the exhibitor. There might be a photo floating around online that is listed under the photographer’s name, while we only have the exhibitor’s details.”
The programme is still to be tested, but if successful (the article doesn’t explain how “success” is determined) the intention is to apply the programme to other online collections and potentially reunite more records with their long-lost photographs.
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If you are not reading the British Photographic History blog, you should – it covers aspects of photographic history and archiving that don’t get covered elsewhere with regular updates on museums, new archives and storage developments for UK prints and paper collections. I have particularly appreciated Michael Pritchard‘s articles.
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This story has absolutely nothing to do with the Super Furry Animals, I just wanted to take the opportunity to recommend the Furries’ album FUZZY LOGIC.
S.F.A. are Welsh wizards of rock.
This is a neat idea. It tells you nothing about football, but a lot about massive environmental change, process or flux.
Landscape Tableau #1, Ivins, Utah, 2007. © Steven B. Smith
I have an increasing ambivalence toward New Topographics-esque studies of the American West. Steven B. Smith‘s work, however, is better than most.
Landscape Tableau #1 (above) captured my imagination. I presume these folk are under the supervision of a state or county department of corrections. What, here, is the link between the landscape and these men as it is enforced by a third party?
I followed Jehad Nga‘s work before on Somali Pirates and US Marines. It is in consideration of those two inquiries, and of Nga’s similar depiction of Kenyan boxers, I wonder about Nga’s choice to use the same shaft-of-light-in-the-dark technique to photograph the Turkana people of Northern Kenya. WSJ Online didn’t mention Nga’s repetition of form.
Nga photographed Turkana while covering the drought in Northern Kenya for The New York Times.
Turkana at Bonni Benrubi Gallery is 10 chromogenic large scale color works, framed in black with no mat and mounted to Plexi. DLK Collection has just reviewed Nga’s exhibition at Bonni Benrubi:
(Source: http://dlkcollection.blogspot.com/2010/06/jehad-nga-turkana-benrubi.html)
If DLK had accounted for Nga’s earlier projects it may have retreated away from attributing Nga’s technique to echoes of colonial ethnographic photography.
The real problem with Nga’s photography is that it’s production is a performance in which he as the photographer is implicated. Nga’s work is art, there can be no doubt. Nga’s portraiture will always bestow dignity upon sitters, but never inherently any understanding of the sitter. He is a director of his world.
STALKING THE ENVIRONMENT
Nga speaks well about My Shadow, My Opponent – photographs of Kenyan boxers. I especially like Nga’s comparison between the boxers in Kibera, Nairobi and US marines in Iraq in how they behave the longer they exist as a group.
Nga also offers this, “what attracted me initially was less the story component of a boxing gym, more-so the environment.”
Nga tempts us in with silky colour-saturated and pitch black prints. We are then duty-bound to position ourselves politically or emotionally with the subject; this is a lose-lose strategy.
Instead, we should be using Nga’s work as a springboard of natural interest into the very specific problems pertaining to this region of the world. Is a gallery wall the best way to reach the largest possibly number of potential supporters? Personally, I don’t think so, but this is a problem of distribution not solely one for the artists.
I support DLK’s expression of unease but I must disagree that, “Nga’s pictures undeniably draw the viewer into the individual narrative of a specific person or family.” Really? I see a lot of similar looking photographs.
I don’t think the issue is that things “haven’t changed much”, it’s that photographers and consumers of media haven’t changed enough, and Nga has hardly changed at all.
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The British Journal of Photography interviewed Jehad recently, and Tewfic El-Sawy has been following Nga’s career closely for years (which for me brings up another debate we should be having about photographers now developing under the gaze of the photography blogosphere … but for another time!)
These two bicycle culture anthropologists stop, chat with and photograph cyclists.
“The Bicycle Portraits project was initiated by Stan Engelbrecht (Cape Town, South Africa) and Nic Grobler (Johannesburg, South Africa) early in 2010. Whenever they can, together or separately, they’re on the lookout for fellow commuters, and people who use bicycles as part of their everyday work, to meet and photograph.”
Prison Photography 