Avedon Photographed his Dying Father

June 20, 2010 in Fine Art, Photography: Non-Prison, Rehabilitative | Tags: , , | by | 2 comments

This excerpt (0.01 – 3.17 minutes) from Darkness and Light is particularly interesting in light of the recent unanimous celebration of Phil Toledano’s Days with my Father.

Avedon admits that his work was invasive and disturbing and that those tenets always exist within the arena for art. Avedon also faced accusations of exploitation for his later work In The American West.

Avedon’s work is good comparison to Toledano’s because reactions to Toledano’s work has been beyond positive. We have seen it as loving and we have seen it as our privilege; this is probably the case, but it doesn’t explain the absence of any discussion on ethics (however brief). Just a thought.

Personally, I am a fan of Toledano’s Days with my Father, and I wonder … do we respond to death differently today, do we respond to the approach of death in photography differently? Here’s a CNN clip of Toledano “blubbing” about his project.

Happy Fathers Day.

The Roma People: Matt Lutton building upon a legacy of wandering photographers

June 19, 2010 in Activist Art, Documentary, Photography: Non-Prison | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | by | 5 comments

UPDATE: Matt emailed me to let me know of the second chapter in this story. View it here.

THE ROMA

A young man in the Stara Gazela camp. © Matt Lutton

Friend Matt Lutton has presented words and images in the latest Lens Culture (Issue #26). His story is about the destruction of a settlement in Belgrade and the subsequent relocation of the Roma inhabitants.

I know that Matt has been working on this story for a long time and it matters very much to him. In September of last year, Matt put together a small edit of the work with a caveat that he was still working through the project. Matt recommended this local Serbian article for background on the issue.

Matt’s words:

Gazela was an isolated community of over 200 Roma families living abjectly difficult lives under the Gazela road bridge in Belgrade, Serbia. They made their living from the recycling of metals and refuse, and the landscape around their homes was filled with toxic mounds of rotting waste. It was a ghetto split on the banks of one of the region’s most important rivers and on premium real estate eyed by the elites. This photo story begins with the community living under the bridge before its destruction and partial relocation on August 31, 2009.

The people living there, depending on their legal status, would either be given a new container to live in on the outskirts of the city, free transport back to their villages or if they had no papers, an unceremonious trip to the curb and likely a home in another improvised camp.

A girl runs through smoke near a suspected arson in an abandoned home in Nova Gazela, a camp on the New Belgrade side of the Sava River. The fire happened on the day before the relocation and destruction of the settlement. © Matt Lutton

Matt’s task, if he is to compete with other storytellers is tough. The Roma people exist across Europe and have fascinated generations of photographers. The bar was set high by Josef Koudelka upon the 1975 publication of Gypsies.

ROMA ACROSS NATIONS

In recent years, Carlo Gianferro‘s Roma Interiors showed us wealthy Roma residences.

Over seven years, Danish photographer, Joakim Eskildsen, traveled with writer, Cia Rinne, through seven Roma countries (Hungary, India, Greece, Romania, France, Russia, and Finland). Resulting in the book, The Roma Journeys. (Elizabeth Avedon write up).

Amanda Rivkin travelled to Slovakia to photograph Roma theatre productions.

Hungarian, Zsuzsanna Ardó, photographed the Roma travellers in her home country. (Video, via The Rights Exposure)

Similarly to Matt, Sanja Knezevic documented Roma people in Belgrade.

Marco Baroncini (whose work I’ve noted before) photographed the Roma in Italian capital Rome. Most of the 15,000 Roma are immigrants from the Balkans. This work impressed James Estrin and thus received Lens blog exposure.

Most recently, some Roma youth have taken up cameras empowering themselves to self-representat. Greg Ruffing gave a very good summary of the Chacipe Project:

“One project in particular this year has really intrigued me — Chacipe: An Exploration of Roma Images and Identity, which features selected images from the Chacipe Youth Photography Contest. The contest was organized by OSI’s Roma Initiatives and the Open Society Archives as part of the Decade of Roma Inclusion 2005-2015, an international initiative to bring together governments, NGOs and Roma civil society to work towards improving the welfare of Roma communities.”

CONCLUSIONS

If you are Matt, flourish in this rich photographic heritage. If you are not Matt, follow his work!

Documentary Photographer Shoes (or, “What You Wearin’ on the Plane?”)

June 18, 2010 in Photography: Non-Prison | by | Leave a comment

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 Collection Dispersed, Sold, Wasted

June 16, 2010 in Institutional, Photography: Non-Prison | Tags: , | by | Leave a comment

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.

Remote Rubbish. A Monday Convergence: Stanley Greene vs. Kurt Tong

June 14, 2010 in Convergence | Tags: , , | by | Leave a comment

'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

Software using fuzzy logic theory to reunite century-old catalogue descriptions with long-lost photographs

June 13, 2010 in Historical, Photography: Non-Prison | Tags: , , , , , | by | 1 comment

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.

– – – –

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.

– – – –

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.


NASA/Flickr present the World Cup Nations as a series of Geography and Climatology lessons.

June 12, 2010 in Institutional, Photography: Non-Prison, Visual Feeds | Tags: , , , , | by | Leave a comment

This is a neat idea. It tells you nothing about football, but a lot about massive environmental change, process or flux.

Steven B. Smith

June 12, 2010 in Fine Art | Tags: , , | by | 1 comment

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?

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