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Bas Princen in partnership with the Architectural Firm OFFICE just received the Silver Lion at the Venezia Biennale in the Architecture category.
His photography is nothing short of stunning. He succeeds on making weird places look even weirder, his images are less forced than Burtynsky but deliver the same inevitable punch of awe and depressing.
We are but ants making larger and larger hills to obliterate the memory of inadequacy delivered by the last.
Alerted to the fact by mrs. deane
© Kenneth Jarecke
Ken Jarecke (blogs at Mostly True) is a world-renowned photojournalist and founding member of Contact Press Images, an illustrious photo agency based in New York.
On Friday he poured his heart out at Tiffin Box:
No, I’m sad and ashamed to report that my lack of desire stemmed from nothing more than a lack of money. More specifically, the constant worry, and the ongoing struggle to pay the bills had taken its toll.
It’s sad, because I didn’t become a photojournalist to get rich (I was never that crazy or misguided). I’m ashamed because much of my money problems were the direct result of poor or stubborn decisions that are completely my fault.
He doesn’t hold back:
Pride and arrogance, a nasty couple of vices. As you can imagine, the only people to suffer from the choices I made was my family. Over the past few years, we’ve cut expenses, and eliminated most of the extras that come with family life, in my vain attempt to reinvent the editorial market and make things right (vanity, there’s another one).
Although I never stopped loving being a dad or a husband, the only thing I accomplished was to give my family a grouchy dad who hated making pictures.
Also recently, one of his daughters got serious ill, it gave him new perspective, Jarecke’s’s not proud anymore, he’s not too worried about bills, he’s taking portrait jobs, having a print sale and moving forward. He just wants more than ever to be a better dad and husband.
It seems to me that Jarecke has said what many are feeling. Bravo Kenneth for your honestly and vulnerability!
Photo: Chip Litherland
I spent all day looking at photography and this was the last thing through my RSS. Exhausted but pissed off, I have to post.
Chip Litherland (@chiplitherland) was on assignment for this story in the New York Times, and shared a few images on his blog. I simply copy & paste the comment I left with Chip here:
The red hues, the spot light (recalling war photography), the drama in general but most of all the solemnity of Jones who poses between the ultimate Hollywood myth and a shooting target – it reeks of a man who’s more obsessed with theatrics & violence than he ever will be with reality.
I expect this was one time you wanted to put down your objective journalist persona and tell him straight he’s a liar, a nutter and a danger to those fooled by his hate.
More of Chip’s images here.
Fair Warning: This will probably be the only post I do about the Islamophobia gripping the vocal minority in America. There’s no point talking about it; it’s hate and those spewing it are dangerous simpletons. My only worry is that TV will continue to bombard people with heady graphics, drastic statement and “passive wonderment” (as Jon Stewart has best described it). At this point, Fox News conjures the wildest conspiracy theories in America.
I was sorry to hear that, after 6-and-a-half years, Big RED & Shiny has decided to close up shop. It’s 135th issue will be its last. It’s not ending operations due to money but because its just arrived at that time.
BR&S’s self-defined scope was the New England Arts scene, but in reality its reach and applied knowledge was national.
In my past writing I have leant on some of the great photography articles at BR&S – Larry Sultan, William Christenberry, Harold Feinstein and Stephen Tourlentes.
BR&S has had over 170 contributors down the years and the sites development stands out as a true community; the writing has been considered and committed – Matthew Gamber was editor-in-chief for 126 issues; writers turned editors, Micah Malone and Christian Holland, started with the first issue; James Nadeau first wrote an article in issue #19 and remained as editor.
Matthew Nash, publisher of BR&S said this:
If Big RED & Shiny were a human, our six-and-a-half years would put them in the first grade. Yet, online we are old. Very old. We have been online a full third of the life of the Internet. There was no Facebook when we started. No Blogger. No MySpace. The iPhone was over 3 years in the future.
If Nash is suggesting that BR&S has less of a place in the rapidly changing internet (which I’d currently characterise as an idea-economy, link-economy, micro-blogging, shuffling-content internet) then he is surely wrong. He observes that perhaps people have less need for editorial framing and more an appetite for primary content. Nash could be right, but I don’t know if that means editorial writing is pushed out. I hope that there’s room for both – I mean, a tweet (which is essential a quick-fire bulletin board) does not compete with a full length article (which is substantive content, ideas).
Whatever. The debate on the web is a distraction really from an announcement that means our arts coverage online just got a little thinner. Thankfully, the archive lives!
BR&S – Sad to see you go. Good luck with future endeavours!
Yakubu Al Hasan, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana 2009
Pieter Hugo’s series Permanent Error appeared in last weeks New York Magazine under the title A Global Graveyard for Dead Computers in Ghana.
The style is not too distant from Nollywood or The Hyena & Other Men, the former of which dusted up a small (and in my opinion, unnecessary) brouhaha last year about neo-colonialism/exploitation in photography.
Hugo’s case, in this instance, is not helped by the fact that the NY Times magazine piece is purely a gallery with no journalist elaborations, save the captions.
The merits and shortcomings of Hugo’s photographic approach is only half the issue; our denial of the extent of racial and economic inequality colours our response.
Hugo graduated in 1994. In this interview (which I think I came across amongst James’ youtube feast) Hugo gives an interesting perspective on how his work fits historically in the South African tradition.
“The photography in South Africa comes from a very political background. Pre-1994, it was an extreme situation here. And if one had the skill you had a certain responsibility to inform the world what was happening here. It was very much all black and white. This is wrong and this is right. There are good guys and there are bad guys.
That’s all changed now. Guys that were good are now bad and the lines aren’t as distinct as they were. […] Things are more complex […] One of the things I hope people get when they look at my pictures is that things are complex.”
This still might not excuse an aesthetic that aggressively depicts African subjects as “the other”, but then, what split second act of opening the shutter is not a machine-mediated differentiation between user and subject?
AFTER THOUGHT
The overtly-political nature of South African (photojournalism) photography is something David Goldblatt, as an art-documentarian, had to negotiate himself away from. And yet, as Fred Ritchin remarks, “during Goldblatt’s career, which began in the early 1960s, nearly everything that he saw was contextualized by the distorting prism of apartheid.”
This makes me wonder if there’s been an adequate survey of ‘South African photography from the second half of the 20th century’ toured on an international stage. If there has been, please let me know.
Over the next few weeks, posts at Prison Photography may thin out a little as I devote a chunk of energies to a new gig at Wired’s photography blog, Raw File. For the following reasons, this is an exciting new departure for me:
– I can call on the expertise of a knowledgeable and calm editor (when I pitch ideas, he says “home run” or “leave it alone”)
– I can piggyback on the back of some ridiculous stats (I guess that’s just Wired for you?!)
– Readers of Raw File have a many more reasons to stop there than they do here (ie, they’re not only tangentially interested in prison reform or in the past somehow stumbled upon my photography commentaries) … and they are harsh critics.
So far I’ve looked at:
– Laura Pannack’s recent work and success – Striking Teenage Portraits Boost Young Photog’s Career
– The alternatives to the Norsigian/Ansel Adams saga – Troves, Caches and Suitcases: Famous Lost Photographs Discovered
– and a Southern California Rapid Transit Employee of the Month Portrait Archive – Fabulous Bus Driver Photos Show Off Mustaches, Sunglasses
TWEETS
My tweeting activity shall also migrate from @brookpete to @rawfileblog. Please follow and spread the word on this newly-active-stretches-every-morning twitter account.
I never realised powerhouse was so prolific.
Prison Photography 