Photography Matters

But the letter about “…several films that may be of interest to you and the photographic community…” set me thinking. I can never resist a film in which one of the main characters is a photographer, or that has photography as a theme. And there are quite a few. (I’m not talking about documentary films here, just dramatic films.) I’m not going to try to list or review all of them, but here are a few personal favourites, some obvious, some you may not have heard of (in no particular order):

Blow Up, (1966, dir. Michaelangelo Antonioni) is a must see. It’s the film that popularised the figure of the streetwise, savvy fashion photographer, with its  protagonist, Thomas (David Hemmings) loosely based on fashion photographer David Bailey. It set off a trend of photographers wearing white trousers and suede jackets.

The film explores the predatory nature of photography/photographers, its sexual angles and fantasies; but more imortantly it is a study of the perception we have, individually and collectively, of reality. You are never sure whether the central event of the film, the witnessing of a murder, actually occurred; the photographer perhaps captured it on film, perhaps not. A key scene in this respect is the final one, involving the travelling mime troup.

As a film-portrayal of London is the swinging sixties, Blow Up is superb. The scene in the nightclub with The Yardbirds playing is alone worth the DVD hire. The Hemmings character is an egoist, a bit of an arsehole really, but he is cool!

In ‘On Photography’, Susan Sontag said this about Blow Up:

And what exactly is the perverse aspect of picture taking? If professional photographers often have sexual fantasies when they are behind the camera, perhaps the perversion lies in the fact that these fantasies  are both plausible and so inappropriate. In Blowup (1966), Antonioni has the fashion photographer hovering convulsively over Verushka’s body, with his camera clicking. Naughtiness indeed! In fact, using a camera is not a very good way aof getting at someone sexually. Between photographer and subject, there has to be distance.

Sontag then refers to the movie Peeping Tom (1960) … about a psychopath who kills women with a weapon concealed in his camera, while photographing them. From memory, he used a tripod with a spike in one leg for a weapon, rather than the camera. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Getting back to Blow Up, Hemmings was obviously well coached in using all the cameras, lights and enlargers. He handles everything like a pro. It always irritates me when I see in other films, for example, a camera with a manual winder being used, but the sound effect is a motor drive. Then they somehow take about 50 frames on a roll of film. If the director isn’t woried about that kind of detail, chances are the rest of the film will be crap too. Not the case with Blow Up at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blow_Up_(film)

On the subject of photography interpreting reality, there’s the Australian film Proof (1991, dir. Jocelyn Moorhouse - not to be confused with the 2005 John Madden film of the same name), in which the blind character Martin (Hugo Weaving) takes photographs and gets his new friend Andy (Russell Crowe) to describe what the photographs show. This is his way of proving the world exists. But what if Crowe lies to him? This is an intriguing story, well worth hunting out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_(1991_film)

High Art (1998, dir. Lisa Cholodenko) is another goodie. Syd (Rahda Mitchell) who works for an art magazine, Frames, discovers photographer Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who has gone to ground after being famous a decade earlier. The photography shown here is of the Nan Goldin school - photographs of friends and peers in an underground, hip lifestyle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Art

Another Nan Goldin connection here: Pecker (1998, dir. John Waters) amused me no end. If you’re a fan of the book “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” by photographer Nan Goldin, you will totally get this film. Title character Pecker (Edward Furlong) incessently photographs his friends, neighbours, workmates and local eccentrics, and he stages an exhibition of his snaps in the diner he works at. A hip New York gallerist (Lili Taylor) happens along to the opening, ”discovers” Pecker and offers him a show in her up market gallery. What ensues is a warning about the ordinary being made famous; and it is a great comment on the fickleness and self-serving nature of the art world. Watch for the art photographer cameo at Pecker’s N.Y.C. exhibition opening (not mentioned in the Wikipedia article). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecker_(film)

Another film set in New York, with the screenplay written by Paul Auster, is Smoke (dir. Wayne Wang & Paul Auster). While it doesn’t feature a lot of photography, photography is central. Augie (Harvey Keitel) obsessively takes a photo at 11am each day outside the tobacconist shop he owns. The camera is set on a tripod in exactly the same spot, pointing in the same direction. When the character played by William Hurt sits down and flicks through the albums containing decades of Augie’s photos, he says, “They’re all the same!” Augie then points out how each photo is different, but you see the same people cropping up over and over. Hurt then sees his dead wife in several photos, the event that kicks the plot into life.

The concept of taking sequential photos in the way shown here may not be new, but it is brilliantlyand uniquely described in this film; and I have noticed a surprising number of people have since adopted the idea, some claiming it as their own. Aside from its photographic relevance, Smoke is a superb film.

Anyway, I can think of a few others involving photojournalists in war-torn countries, and there’s that totally disappointing NZ film about the Burton Brothers, but enough for now. Your contributions and additions are most welcome.

Filed under: Uncategorized by james | 29 March, 2009
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Any other shut-ins watch Midsomer Murders last night? (Picture of Innocence, screened on Prime, 7/3/09.)  I admit the opening sequence of a Rolleiflex TLR being used, along with a Weston Master V meter and Invercone, hooked me in. The old bloke photographing a tree with said gear was annoyed when a rival photographer jumped in front of him brandishing a Nikon D2x digital SLR with a large flash attached. The shot of the tree was ruined and an argument ensued.

The nameless town in the TV programme had two camera shops: one was full of film cameras, wooden tripods, packets of photographic paper, and had a darkroom in the cellar. A hand-written sign near the door read No Digital Cameras Sold Here. The other shop, Quik Pix, did not even sell film. Jack Sprat and his wife spring to mind. And, of course, there had to be a murder. The camera club doyen was garrotted with the braided strap of his own light meter. Ouch.

It was the portrayal of film-using photographers as fuddy-duddies and digital photographers as a bunch of yobs that prompted me to write this post tonight, (while also trying to watch Top Gear). I imagine that feuds like that portrayed in Pictures of Innocence are going on in camera clubs all over Britain, New Zealand and elsewhere. It is also a debate in art circles, and in galleries that show photography.

You will notice the title of this post is Analogue and digital, not versus. In my view, there is not a competition or a feud of any kind; the two streams co-exist. I continue to slaver over fine prints produced in the darkroom by the likes of Laurence Aberhart, Mark Adams and Andrew Ross. But of course a print doesn’t achieve fineness by dint of coming from a darkroom. Less than a decade ago, most black & white prints were still made in the darkroom, with various levels of skill, and most were never intended or destined for the walls of a gallery; it was a simple, cheap way to print one’s work. (And it still is, although materials and chemicals are becoming somewhat harder to source. The internet is a necessity if you still want to work in the darkroom.)

No, fine printmaking is a craft, and, funnily enough, some of the same people who were making fine prints in the darkroom are now making fine prints digitally. It also holds that people who were crap in the darkroom are never really going to make good digital prints, because digital printing is also a craft.

Dr Nick Bradford, a fine photograher based in Taupo, sent me a pigment print last week. I had asked him about making further darkroom prints as I have now sold most of the stock of his work. He said that while that was still possible, he had moved to using an Epson printer and Epson Traditional paper.  I have to admit that the new Epson print had a lovely tonal range, near-enough identical to Nick’s earlier silver-gelatin darkroom print on fibre-based paper. The glossy surface and the sheer whiteness of the paper are qualities I have yet to adjust to, but I was impressed.

http://www.northlight- images.co.uk/reviews/paper/epson_TPP_EFP.html  for a review of the paper.

Wellington photographer Julian Ward, a lifelong Leica shooter, has been printing digitally for some time, after investing in a Nikon film scanner to convert his 35mm negatives to digital files. He also shoots with a compact digital camera, more often now, apparently. Peter Black has recently dismantled his darkroom and replaced it with a ‘Lightroom’. Along with the Adobe software, he has been working with a top of the range Epson printer and Hannemulhe paper. He has also been photographing digitally. Having been frustrated in the past with wet-process colour printing, he now has full control of every aspect of his photographic quality; a greater degree of control than the darkroom ever allowed him, he says. When I first heard of his move to digital, I jokingly accused him of ‘going over to the dark side.’ He replied, ‘No, you’re on the dark side. I am on the light side.’ Photospace Gallery will show Peter Black’s latest colour digital work in April.

The first digital inkjet prints shown at Photospace gallery were Leigh Mitchell-Anyon’s ‘Tiki Tour’ series, in May, 2002. http://www.photospace.co.nz/expo055.htm  Admittedly these prints were not archival, with an estimated life of 30 years before noticeable colour shift. They were priced accordingly, with the option of purchasing a second print at a lesser price to keep in storage. I was very happy with the appearance of the images; the velvety blacks and over-saturated hues gave the photographs that extra degree of removal from reality, a hint at kitschness in keeping with their subject matter. ‘Nite Sites’ in mid-2003 played upon the same qualities. http://www.photospace.co.nz/expo068.htm

Yvonne Westra’s ‘Staged’ in September 2003 http://www.photospace.co.nz/expo068.htm was the first exhibition of archival pigment prints shown at Photospace. She used Quad-tone pigments on rag paper to print her surreal composite images. Yvonne has another exhibition at Photospace gallery in March, ’Magic Realism’ - http://www.photospace.co.nz/expo140.htm

These exhibitions and others have sat alongside traditional analogue works for the last seven years, (and most of the colour works shown were digitally printed onto C-type photographic paper, even if captured on film). There is really no problem with it; no competition, no feuds, no yobs, no fuddy-duddies.

At least not among the exhibitors. When it comes to selling prints to serious collectors of photography, there still seems to be a bit of resistance to pigment prints.

Well, the problem is no longer one of longevity of the print. A properly processed silver-gelatin print will last a century at least, with adequate protection from the environment. In the digital world, the high quality papers now available from Iflord, Epson, Hannemulhe and other manufacturers are chemically highly stable and more than adequate in the archival department. So now are the pigment inks, black & white and colour. If you don’t believe me, check out the world authority in the field - Wilhelm Research: http://www.wilhelm-research.com/ The lasting quality of a colour inkjet print now far exceeds Cibachrome or any other type of wet-process photographic colour print. And the tonal quality of the inkjet-type print is now almost indistinguishable from a wet-process print. Though not inferior, the surface quality is the main point of difference, and that’s hard to pick when the print is framed under glass.

The problem lies with the perception of how the photographic artist’s pigment print is made. It’s simple - everyone’s done one - you just get the photo into some sort of software, tweak it up a bit (a one-button process in the likes of Picasa) and hit the Print button. You could rattle off a hundred prints in no time.

Wrong. For a start, good quality paper ranges up from about $15.00 per A3 sheet, and there’s inevitable wastage. The pigments are pricey, and even the printing machine will render itself obsolete after a few years (if you’re lucky), so will need replacing. Weighing that against a few dollars a sheet for darkroom paper and the decades of lifespan of the average enlarger, and that puts the cost of inkjet printing upwards of 5x more than darkroom printing.

Time-wise, I’d say about the same, or maye a bit more for pigment printing. Once you get the hang of the darkroom, making good prints isn’t really that difficult, (although making great prints is still a talent confined to but a few individuals). Yet, making good quality prints using a computer and pigment printer still requires dedication, patience and a lot of research. Photographers can be heard discussing the merits of the various paper brands and types and the various new inks and printers with the same enthusiasm as they once did darkroom materials and processes. That’s not to mention the ongoing nightmare of screen calibration. When you decide to start to print digitally, you are stepping onto the bottom end of a long, steep learning curve; one that never ends, because of constant innovations hitting the market.

Of course, once you have your software and printer profiles in place, your test prints made and your finished image file saved, there’s nothing to stop you hitting the Print button as many times as you can afford to. Except the market, of course; are there buyers for your 99 prints? Most photographers only make as many prints as will satisfy their immediate needs, and those will be the vintage prints. Later prints will still look different because of ever-evolving technology and materials, among other factors.

I feel now, though, that there is a good case for photographers revisiting the idea of (small) limited editions in printing. This is because of the perception of lesser value of digital inkjet prints, compared to silver-gelatin prints, coming from potential buyers and collectors. It may now be preferable for photographers to declare limited editions in the range of 3 to 10, with no more than 1 or 2 Artist’s Proofs. This takes into consideration the size of the market for NZ fine art photographs. My position (and that of some other galleries) of preference for open editions with serial numbered and dated prints may have to take a back seat, at least for a few years or until the practise of digital print making beds down.

Digital pigment prints on high quality paper will soon be the prevalent medium for exhibiting photography, so the photography buyers and galleries will have to adjust to it. From what I have learned from practitioners, there is as much skill, time and effort going into making fine pigment prints as there was with darkroom prints, and the production costs are significantly greater, so the pigment prints should have at least the same value. However, it is necessary to limit the print editions to ensure scarcity in order for the art market to adapt to and accept this change of medium and technique.

Filed under: Uncategorized by james | 8 March, 2009
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The P.O.A. Collective are: F. Emera, R. Chival, Sue Denholm. Soundtrack by Wellington Analogue Noise Kollective. The installation “Divided by Zero” is at Gilberd Marriott Gallery, 37 Courtenay Place, Wellington, until March 3rd, 2009.

http://www.photospace.co.nz/gilberdmarriottgallery.htm for gallery info, and

http://www.photospace.co.nz/_gmg_pages/poa/POA-installation_photos.htm for installation photos. I have lifted a few of them for this review.

“Divided by Zero” installation at GMG, 24th February to 3rd March 2009.

I understand the title of the exhibition is drawn from its soundtrack. Mathematicians know that dividing by zero is more than an error; it makes no sense whatsoever. So when you place an antique Hewlett Packard calculator  atop a detuned radio and instruct it to divide by zero (zero, enter, divide in Reverse Polish Notation) it gives an error signal, a flashing zero, which interferes with the radio signal in an annoying, obtrusive rhythm. Fuzzed out, this forms the background of the first half of the ambient soundtrack. Other devices employed, I am told, include lowering the recording device (ironically, a digital voice recorder) into a cannon shell (”Shellcase”) and raising it out again. These guys sound like performance artists. I for one would be intrigued to see a performance by W.A.N.K. in the gallery installation, but it has proved impossible to arrange.

The installation itself is somewhat hard to pin down, as it seems to be concerned with two seperate issues: the demise of conventional photographic practise and the sacrosanct but temporary nature of the exhibition space itself, in general. Let’s deal with the latter aspect first. The blue screen (actually a photographer’s paper background roll supported by a pair of studio poles) seems to await some non-existent video projection. It is cordoned off by an arc of cheap plastic chairs in such a way that if you want to be seated (to view what?) you must move one of the chairs. But the chairs are supposedly part of the artwork, so one should not touch. Also, placed neatly on the chairs are the exhibition catalogue sheets. Help yourslef to one? No: each sheet is signed S.D. and edition-numbered. Are they then for sale? It appears, on a second visit, that people have absconded with some of them. Does this rate as an art theft?

Also apparently a part of the installation, flanking the blue screen and propped on more plastic chairs, are a couple of coreflute signs saying No Throughfare. Don’t they mean No Thoroughfare? I’m sure I saw signs like these around Courtenay Place during the recent carnival, and they don’t appear in the photo above, so perhaps they are a recent addition; a testament to the illiterate nature of signwriters or just a couple of patches of yellow to contrast with the large area of blue? Either way, they declare at least a part of the gallery room Off Limits. Rules of engagement? Disengagement?

Now we get to the more obvious photographic theme. This box, previously a light-tight container for silver-gelatin black & white photographic paper, appears to have been used, several times, to freight precious, finished photographs from photographer to gallery. It probably once belonged to eminent photographer Mark Adams, and has travelled through McNamara Gallery, one of NZ’s two specialist photographic galleries, and most recently contained photos by Andrew Ross. It has now been signed by Sue Denholm (Anyone get the pun? Each member of this collective seems to have a pun for a name!) and hung in a gallery, so does that make it a piece of art in its own right?

The same question could be asked of the almost-empty bottle of developer, signed by F. Emera and placed on a plinth with a couple of spotlights shining down on it.

The Geoff Sparrow Camera Repairs sign carries no signature; the contribution of the even-more-mysterious third member of the P.O.A. Collective, R. Chival, perhaps? Geoff Sparrow is a repairer of mechanical-type cameras and is recently retired; much like the things he worked on. With the move by many photographers towards the latest digital cameras and printing materials, this small collection of relics from the age of the darkroom takes on the significance of a museum collection. It reminds me of the stuffed birds you used to see at the National Museum on Buckle Street, Wellington; the moa, the huia and other recent extinctions. (Ilford clings on like the notornis while century-old Agfa went kaput two years or so ago.)

A less-noticeable part of the installation are the pencil marks on the wall pointing out nail holes from the previous exhibition that need to be filled and painted over (before the next ‘real’ exhibition?) and the can of paint and other decorating tools lying or hanging about. Something to do with the temporary nature of a gallery exhibition, perhaps? Each exhibition is written over, erased like videotape, by its successor. So are works of art in a gallery really ephemera, or need they be archival in order to be saleable, collectible, to spend the rest of their lives in some private or public collection; or to endure a century in the dark recesses of a basement storeroom, awaiting future art-archaeologists. “Who the hell would sign an old plastic bottle?” they may well ask.

It might be that he most telling aspect of this installation is the acronym of the creators of the soundtrack: Wellington Analogue Noise Kollective.

Filed under: Reviews by james | 28 February, 2009
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My apologies for not posting to this blogsite for a time. And I guess the last couple of postings were a little lame, judging by the lack of comments. My excuse is I have been preoccupied with Paranormal Investigation lately. You may have seen the coverage in the Herald’s Canvas magazine supplement, among other things in the press, and I’ve been diddling with the website (using old-school html, version 0.5 or something) www.strange-occurrences.com

The author investigating the paranormal, or a least pretending to for the photo.

The other reason for the lack of postings is that, frankly, things in the photography world have been a little dull lately. Nothing has got me fired up. OK, there are great new products around, but there are plenty of other forums and websites about the latest technological offerings and their pros and cons.  No, I just haven’t found anything to get my teeth into.

Having said that, I’m still a little steamed at the demise of the NZCP. Their collection of photographs and other photography-related items is in the process of being deacquisitioned; that is, being picked over by others. It’s probably for the best, because although the collection is being broken up, its better part will be rehoused in public collections with storage facilities and public and internet access that are better than the NZCP ever had. What continues to irk me is that all this has been done behind closed doors; there has been no information circulated by the board of trustees to the subscribership of the NZCP, many of whom have been long-term financial supporters and some of whom have even donated valuable items to said collection. What a shambles! www.nzcp.com

So I am now going to resort to reviewing an exhibition currently showing in a gallery I own and half-run (not Photospace). It’s an installation that, among other things, seems to be about photography. It’s only on till March 3rd, so not many people will get to see it. And some of those who have seem completely mystified, walking out wondering if it’s an exhibition at all and not just something halfway through being installed. The review follows in the next posting - maybe tonight (but there’s some good telly on) or maybe tomorrow.

Current recommendation: Peter McLeavey is showing an exhibiton of photographs by Laurence Aberhart. http://www.photospace.co.nz/whatson01.htm for details. Although being a long-time fan, I have sometimes found Aberhart’s photographic approach a little dry. However, McLeavey’s selections of his work are always enjoyable and lively, and this exhibition perhaps shows a loosening of approach, a more humanistic view. I wonder if there has been a little reverse-influence on the master by the acolyte (you know who I mean). I only saw the work during the opening and so will have to revisit when the gallery is quieter.

Filed under: Uncategorized by james | 28 February, 2009
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This is a photograph of my uncle Douglas Ralph Gilberd (known as Ralph), my father’s brother, who was killed in action in August 1942 at the battle of El Alamein. I believe he succumbed to gangrene after being severly injured by a land mine. Unfortunately, antibiotics were not available in time, but they were in use shortly afterwards.

This photograph had been around the house for a long time, and I unearthed it to take to a family reunion we had over Labour weekend. I admit, it had me fooled. I thought it had been taken in the North African desert.

But my observant wife, Denise, noticed this photo (below) in another family member’s collection. It looks to have been taken in the front garden of my grandparents’ Palmerston North home when Ralph was on leave. Someone may be able to enlighten us as to how the result above was achieved, but I would guess that an enlargement was made from the snapshot negative, then clear cut with a scalpel blade, rephotographed, and the made-up desert background hand-painted in.

The fake looks obvious in hindsight, but if you’re not looking for something (Ralph was in the desert, after all, and vignetting a genuine background to declutter a photo was common practise) you tend not to find it. I wonder if this level of falsification was usual for photographic studios. It may have been something they advertised as a service, or else it was done on special request. It is understandable that my grandparents would want the photo to appear this way, especially after having lost a son.

A lot of alteration of family photos goes on these days, with the most common request being to remove some person who has fallen out of favour. I used to advertise on the Photospace studio website that photos can be digitally restored and retouched, but repeated requests to alter photographs made me uncomfortable. The last straw was somebody asking, “And while you’re on the job, could you straighten her mouth? It’s always bothered me that she had a crooked mouth.”

While these things are usually done in all innocence, they can end up being misleading to later generations who are trying to establish historical information by looking at photographs. A detail such as a mouth being straightened could lead to a mis-identification, for instance. Manipulation of photographs, whether by using computer software or old school methods, is not just an ethical issue for photojournalists and publishers, but for anyone who alters the content of any photograph.

This posting has got a little heavier in tone than I intended, after laughing at myself for being duped by such a low-tech trick. I’ve read so much discussion and seen so many examples of unethical photo manipulation, but this is the first time I’ve directly encountered it, trivial as the example may be.

Filed under: Uncategorized by james | 28 October, 2008
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Mark Amery’s Wednesday art review has just been cancelled by the Dominion Post. This leaves the major metropolitan newspaper in New Zealand’s ‘creative capital’ with no visual arts reviewer! I believe this will make the Dom Post unique in this regard, with all of the other metro papers running a healthy level of art criticism. How embarrassing for them.

While The Dominion Post continues to cover the visual arts with informative promotional pieces—and I’m not knocking this practise, especially as Photospace gallery and some of its exhibiting artists have benefited significantly from the publicity—the loss of Amery’s column will leave a serious gap. As I mentioned in an introductory posting on this blog, the thing that is weakest in the triangle of artist-gallery-critic is the criticism. Artists need critics in order to give them objective, external feedback on their work, and the viewing public need critics to help them develop their personal opinions, tastes and insights into current exhibitions. With the recent demise of the NZ Journal of Photography, there is now a severe shortage of publishing outlets for criticism of photographic art, particularly in Wellington.

To clarify, galleries and artists send press releases to newspaper arts editors, who then sometimes decide to give editorial coverage. This usually involves a reporter interviewing the artist (and sometimes the gallery director or curator) and a photographer. It’s all great for publicising the show but it’s different to what a critic does. A critic will visit the exhibition, usually unannounced, look at the work, make some notes, do some research and come up with a piece of writing that is a mix of description, evaluation and personal opinion. This is done without input from the gallery or the artist. In my experience with Photospace gallery, there has been a high level of publicity-type journalism published, some it by the Dom Post, and it has all been much appreciated. Most of the exhibitions have enjoyed some degree of editorial coverage. Reviews, on the other hand, have been few and far between. A couple per year seems to be about it, unfortunately, and I don’t think many other private galleries have fared better.

Being an art critic in a country the size of NZ is, of course, fraught with hazards, the main one being that everyone knows everyone else. In the days of punk and new wave, (I hated that term) it was not unknown for a journalist to get the snot kicked out of him by fans of the band, or the band itself, for writing a bad review of a gig or record. I haven’t heard of anything like this lately, but having an opinion and publishing it can still make one unpopular. Mark Amery always wrote fairly, with balance and insight, and I don’t believe he could have seriously offended anyone. But he wasn’t afraid to give an opinion, to say what he thought. Reading Amery’s column, you always knew you’d read a review. Some other reviewers (I could name names…) seem to be able to waffle for 500 or 1000 words without actually saying anything. You end up confused as to what they actually think because they’re too wimpy to offer much more than mere description. Amery also avoided the tedium of academic-style writing, choosing not to use his column to showcase his vocabulary or a collection of post-modern catch phrases.

Mark Amery made a successful and vital contribution to the DomPost over five years, and the quality and insightfulness of his writing was at a level above most of his fellow columnists. He gave photography a fair suck of the sav too, being a photographer himself. I recall an interesting exhibition of his colour street photography at Bowen Galleries a few years ago. Perhaps The Listener or some other high quality arts-focussed publication will pick up his writing talent and run with it.

Last week Mark circulated an email to announce the cancellation of his column. The email contained quotes from the letter he received from his editor giving reasons for the decision. While that information is out there, I won’t repeat any of it because the email’s contents should really have been kept private. Still, I’m glad he sent it.

One thing he asked, and that I will repeat, is that you write to the editor of the Dominion Post and give your opinion about the axing of his column. This would be more useful than commenting here, but please feel free to do that also.

Filed under: Uncategorized by james | 27 October, 2008
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Front cover, Peter peryer Photographer

Peter Peryer Photographer, with essays by Peter Simpson and Peter Peryer, Auckland University Press 2008, printed by Printlink Ltd, Wellington. 136 pages, 80 plates.

Many photographers I have met openly hate Peryer. Not personally, of course, but because of his success and status, which they feel is undeserved. But most art lovers who are not photographers think he’s wonderful. I’m a photographer but not a Peryer-hater; in fact I’m a fan. However, my knowledge of photographic practise gives me some sympathy with and understanding of these photographers’ views. So this review is going to be somewhat schizophrenic, speaking from two opposing viewpoints. I hope I can reconcile them.

Many photographers, I feel, are sticklers; they tend to carry too much baggage, (technical, historical, conventional), and are hampered in their perception of photographic artworks because of it. However, their collective (and generalised) case against Peryer is a strong one and so needs to be expressed. (I haven’t yet encountered another reviewer bold enough to make this assertion, but someone has to. To review this book without saying it is to perpetuate the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome, a thing that plagues much writing on photography in this country.)

So here we go. In this publication, even the largest plates sit on the page with a generous border, so the photographs are not reproduced up to a size that severely exposes their faults. In Second Nature (City Gallery, Wellington, 1995), some photographs appeared as double page spreads and many of those were the ones that were technically flawed. (Plates 14, 15, 16, 37, 44 & 45 are the worst offenders.) Outside of photographers, the rest of the art world doesn’t seem to mind about this. If Peryer says it’s a good photo by including it in his oeuvre, then it is, end of story. Peter Peryer Photographer also suffers from these faults, and, although to a lesser degree, still significantly.

As an illustration, imagine trying to enjoy a performance by a string quartet when the violinist keeps missing notes. Each time it happens, you cringe in pain. You look at the person sitting next to you who appears to be enjoying the interpretation and seems blissfully unaware of the wrong notes. He must be tone deaf, you think, so what’s he getting out of any of this? Further, does any Finn Brothers record contain a missed harmony, or are Elizabeth Knox’s novels peppered with spelling mistakes and bad punctuation?

Conus, 2007 (Plate 19) is but one example of Peryer’s lack of care in his craft. The background is dirty and there is both camera shake and lack of depth of field, reducing the act of photography to the level of note taking. I can see the idea of the photograph but its technical flaws are just too irritating. In contrast, the cat toy photo, used on the book’s cover, which presents the same photographic challenges to create, is perfectly executed. (Could be the modern (digital?) camera deals with things more easily.) I could go on picking the flaws in other images in PPP but you will easily discern the offenders yourself. The most prevalent affliction is the flatness and dullness that comes from underexposure, which arises, predictably, in those light and subject situations where one has to understand how the camera’s metering system works in order to obtain a good exposure. I needn’t go further into explaining what is a common beginner’s mistake. Unfortunately, these and other problems in the execution of the photography will always distract from a discerning person’s enjoyment of the works. This has to be said.

(WORD has done an odd thing from here on in. I must’ve hit something by accident and I don’t know how to correct it, sorry. Call it reverse paragraph indenting. It could catch on…)

Fortunately, quite often Peryer gets the technical stuff right. Trout, (LakeTaupo), 1987 (Plate 71)absolutely sings. I have seen photographic prints of most of the selected monochrome works, and the book reproductions do them justice. My problem (and a lot of other peoples’) is that in the Peryer oeuvre, the misses are too often paraded as hits. Many photographs could easily and simply have been repeated and made better. The perception  that those in the worlds of art and publishing don’t seem bothered by this leaves a lot of more technically competent photographers tasting sour grapes.

Now I’ve got that issue out of the way, let’s look at the book itself, starting with the cover. Sarah Maxey, one of NZ’s top two of three book designers, has done it again here. The minimal, elegant cover design features a quirky, friendly colour photograph to lure the potential buyer. The back cover photo is a black and white image of a monarch butterfly, a lovely irony. The choice of typography for the title is surprising to the point of seeming inappropriate. I don’t know what the typeface is but it’s kind of flowery and feminine, with these qualities heightened by lifting the colours for each word from the photograph. The predictable typeface would’ve been a modernistic, masculine sans-serif in one colour, but Maxey is never predictable.

The book as a whole looks and feels beautiful and satisfying. The design throughout is classic but contemporary, easy to read and respectful of the photographs. (It irritates me when less mature, more egotistical designers get hold of a photography book and use it as a showpiece for everything they can do. Maxey has never been guilty of that.) PPP is a respectable size for a photographer of Peryer’s importance and career stage, without being a tome. You can easily hold this book in your hands and sit back and enjoy it. The two essays are kept out of the way of the plates, and the titles under the photographs are readable but unobtrusive. I like this.

The most annoying thing about the design of this book, something which is obviously necessary in keeping to a physical size and budget while presenting a useful number of photographs, is the pairing of the images on opposite pages. This is almost always difficult, a necessary evil. The problem lies in the way our brains work. When we are presented with two things side by side, we compare them and we find the similarities and differences. Intellectual comparisons follow, but it’s the visual ones that hit first and hardest. Usually these are facile (in a nice way), such as Punakaiki, 1997 and Owl, 2003 (plates 28 and 29). Here, the shape and patterning of one of the rocks echoes and reflects the head feathers of the owl. So, by creating that kind of visual pairing, which occurs from the first set of facing plates, the reader is set up to look for it on every page. With the pairing Farm Study, 1986 and Meccano Bus, 1984 (plates 14 and 15) the relationship is more subtle; it has to do with the size and angle of one of the sheep being the same as the bus, and reflecting the same rounded posterior—another echo pairing. The rural setting of both images (genuine for the sheep and constructed for the school bus model) is an example of an intellectual comparison. But given this setup, other pairings are a mystery, such as Isabella, 2001 and Trig (Rangitoto Island), 1993 (plates 42 and 43). This is what movie editors call a hard cut; there is no apparently graphical similarity between these two images; rather, they contrast and the effect is jarring.

The running together of black and white and colour images, however, is not jarring; it is skilfully done. Once considered a no-no in book design, this tactic works well here. I guess the photographs were selected for the book on their individual merits, then put into sequence. It would be a difficult exercise to prove it, but I believe the sequencing could have been done better.

Plates 8 and 9

Now here’s a bizarre comparison: Peryer’s photographs and the songs of The Ramones. If you don’t like the American punk bank, you might say they’re boring because all their songs sound the same. But, within a defined, recognisable style and some pretty tight self-imposed songwriting parameters, each song is distinctive and has something to say. Likewise, Peryer uses a limited range of formal devices and tends to select (rather, collect) subject matter that fits parameters and fields of interest he has defined for himself. One obvious subject category is The Tower (we’ll call it), mostly including man made structures, but also natural ones, here compared in Apple Tree, 2004 (plate 8) and Aerial, 2005 (plate 9). There are many other obvious examples. A common compositional device is to have The Thing come into the frame from the side or bottom, but not entirely, as in Sand Shark, 1991 (plate 30). These are two the more obvious features characterising and defining Peryer’s style, and it’s an interesting exercise to find others.

This kind of analysis can have the effect of rendering Peryer’s photographic vision trite; another pylon-type structure, another animal half cut off by the frame; but it isn’t. His straightforward photographic technique and style works like many good things in that it makes the photography look easy. It’s like watching Martin Crowe bat for New Zealand. When he was in form, he seemed to have all the time in the world to play his shot, and each shot was so elegant, almost disrespectful to the bowler’s delivery. What makes photography so hard, though, is that it is so easy. (Anyone know who said that?) Especially these days. It comes down to knowing what to photograph. The How is good too, but should always be subservient to the What. If the best thing going for a photographer is his technique, the How,  the result will almost always be images that are dead in the water. Peryer’s images are far from dead. He’s always been stronger on the What than the How, and the What is the hard bit.

It is the simplicity of Peryer’s style of photographing that—when he gets it right—allows the act of photography to become almost transparent, putting just The Thing in front of us for our consideration. Because we don’t have to perform visual gymnastics to figure out what it is we are being shown (except where subject scale is an issue, a trick Peryer sometimes plays on us), there is more time to mentally spiral out from the idea of the image, to make our own associations and readings. Photographers who consider themselves superior to Peryer at executing images must consider that if they are being too visually complex, they can lead the viewer into a quagmire that, once escaped from, is immediately fled: once we’ve worked out what we’re actually looking at, we move on. The sophistication of Peryer’s photography lies in its apparent simplicity—we know What we are being shown, but now, Why?—and this is one of the reasons his images stay with us, reside in our subconscious and resonate, while others’ photos are not so well retained.

Peter Peryer Photographer is a valuable book because it presents the last two decades of work by this important New Zealand artist. It is the first major publication to include Peryer’s colour photographs, and integrating them with his 1990s black and white images (as opposed to a chronological sequencing) shows the continuous nature, but also the subtle evolution, of his vision through the transition from monochrome to colour, analogue to digital. Indeed, allowing old and new technologies of image making to mingle does a nice job of breaking down the prejudices around each that people seem to be so tediously obsessed with at present. It is the image that is important, not how it was made.

Having said that, the timing of this publication is interesting because of this analogue to digital transition, possibly making this book seminal. Other important photographers such as Peter Black have recently made a similar, revitalising transition, and Ans Westra has also been photographing in colour for some time (although she still rejects the digital camera). Peryer was one of the first to pick up on and embrace digital technology—full credit to him for it—which offers a greater degree of control for colour work than has been possible in analogue. I enjoyed his colour photographs in The Chelsea Project (1984), and I bought PPP mainly for the colour work.

I wrote all of the above before reading the two essays, as I was more concerned with the visual and tactile nature of the book. Peryer’s autobiographical piece presents glimpses of life during the time he grew up and memories, all of which provides a context to understand his photography and his need to photograph. The essay leads nicely into the photographs. Peryer has a highly visual writing style which employs bite-sized paragraphs, each one leaving a distinct impression, like his photographs. His blog http://peryer.blogspot.com/ is a similarly interesting and entertaining read.

Peter Simpson’s essay uses the concept of Peryerland as a gimmick to relieve its dryness. Nonetheless, picking up in time from where Peryer’s account leaves off, it is a useful history of his art career and it describes each of his publications and illustrates their covers. A three-page chronology follows the essay. Simpson’s thoroughly-researched contribution adds weight to the book, and is informative in tone. The more insightful content is the quoting from Peryer, well handled throughout. He does a good job of placing Peryer in the context and framework of New Zealand and international photography, and he mentions a large number of other important figures in the process. His readings of the photographs are a tad obvious and simplistic in many cases, and mostly revolve around the dual meanings and playfully deceptive appearances, in scale, material etc, of the subject matter. This is still useful content for anyone encountering Peryer’s work for the first time in PPP. The two essays, front and back in the book, balance each other nicely.

I am pleased to see that Peter Peryer Photographer was printed in New Zealand. Printlink have done an excellent job, and they have developed into this country’s leading printer of high quality photographic books. It is far better to print here than to shave the budget by going to China, Italy or wherever, and it is by publishers using NZ printers that expertise and experience is built up here and retained. It is also prefeable from foreign exchange, employment and environmental perspectives.

I recommend PPP either in hardback (limited to 100 copies, hand numbered and signed by both the Peters) or in softback for $50.00. I’m shelving my hardback at home and will get the softback for the gallery, because I know I’ll be pulling it out and discussing it many times with gallery visitors and our photography students, as I have with my copy of Second Nature is now looking very second hand.

And just to readdress those who share my view on the the technical issues put forward earlier: get hold of PPP and read the photographer’s essay, then come at the photos again with a more open mind. Peryer has said that his photographs are all self portraits; that is, they are very personal and each reflect some aspect of the photographer’s self and life. Reading his essay helps one to know something about the Peryer’s life experience—you almost feel like you know the man by the end of it—and thereby the photographs are made more accessible, understandable, relevant and meaningful. Honestly, how can you hate the guy?

Leo and PPP

Filed under: Reviews by james | 21 September, 2008
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