Photography Matters

Picture of the week: “The noble hyena”

Filed under: Uncategorized by james | 17 May, 2008
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The precedent for this exhibition was at Waitangi Park on the Wellington waterfront when it opened in 2005. Tens of thousands enjoyed the outdoor exhibition of photographs by Yaan Arthus-Bertrand. Overhead shots of flocks of birds, herds of hippos or whatever seemed to conform to most peoples’ idea of exciting photography. (I guess these are the same people who flock to the international press photography award shows for similar reasons.) Risking sounding like a snob, the nature images bored me rigid. (This is possibly a result of excessive exposure to nature docos on telly in the 90s.)

Mayor Kerry Prendergast and designer Simon Bush-King unveil the first light box photo, an image by Clare Noonan. Hmm… as I recall, the rain was falling downwards.

The photos in the light boxes outside the St James Theatre, Courtenay Place, Wellington have the opposite effect on me: they are very engaging. There have been a number of proposals for the remodelling of this area over the last decade or so, but at last it has been done (except the old toilets…). This inaugural exhibition, Flanerie and figments, was curated by Andy Palmer, working with the park’s designer Simon Bush-King. Andy told me the photo selection was an 18 month project, requiring the approval of the Public Arts Panel.

As Wellington mayor Kerry Prendergast said in her speech at the park opening last Friday evening, 2^nd May, some of the images were not to her taste. And I have to say, as exhibition openings go, this was a goodie; very nice wine and food, a jazz band, no bouncers on the door or the kind of heavy-handedness experienced at City Gallery openings, (where one can feel like a schoolkid being herded around, forced to listen to interminable speeches by numerous sponsors before being allowed to touch the wine, etc (I can feel myself being plucked from the invitation list…)), and the speeches were kept concise.

I would like to congratulate the Wellington City Council for their part in this project; for agreeing to put large scale photographs in the middle of town where thousands will see them daily, and for not butting in and censoring the images, even though they have expressed a level of disapproval. Public art should be controversial. No, it would’ve been much easier for the WCC to push for “professional” photographs, highlighting or celebrating some absolutely positive aspect of the city, perhaps making people feel more optimistic about the place, but being ultimately banal. Glad they saw sense and let the curator and designer do their work.

Funnily enough, I was the only person at the opening with a proper camera (with the intention only of taking the images for this blog). There was no press photographer there, and no appointed WCC photographer that I could see. Could it be that with the possible controversy surrounding these selected images, the attention of the press was not sought? Normally an event like this would receive coverage, I would’ve thought.

http://www.wellington.govt.nz/news/display-item.php?id=3198 for more info about Courtenay Place Park.

Curator/artist Andy Palmer, artists John Lake and Shaun Lawson, at the opening.

As I said before, I find the work (mostly) engaging. It’s the sort of material you would see in a small, edgy gallery where it would then only find a few hundred viewers. Here, anyone passing on a bus gets a good view of at least eight of the sixteen 3m high images. And a healthy proportion of pedestrians are stopping to explore. As a bunch of photographs, these certainly challenge the viewer.

Viewing work by Victoria Birkinshaw, at the opening.

My favourite is John Lake’s photo of a girl standing in a tree; one of those images that asks more questions than it answers. Palmer’s pale treescapes, panoramas disconcertingly rotated and set vertically, seem to predict the aging effects the other images may suffer in their six-month tenure. Shaun Lawson has set out to be controversial, with the box at the Mt Victoria end of the park housing his image of a grossly extended tongue; one of the photos that didn’t appeal to the mayor. His other image, from his Actress series, shows a young woman who has suffered a beating from her partner. (This image may soon be withdrawn and replaced by another in the same series.) I particularly enjoy Steve Rowe’s larger than life photos of money machines. At this totemic scale, they are at once deceptively real (I wonder how many people will bowl up in their cars to use them, or maybe try to tow them out) and objects of worship to the stuff that increasingly drives our society. Courtenay Place is the perfect location for them. Clare Noonan’s almost featureless coastal landscapes have a walk-in feel, and are confrontational in their abandonment of traditional, camera club-type compositional elements. I’m a fan. Amelia Handscomb’s images of the historic Thorndon house The Moorings (as photographed by Robin Morrison in the mid 1970s) gain in tension from being sited in the urban pastiche that in Courtenay Place, 2008. The architecture of the Reading Theatre opposite, with its neon signage, is a particular contrast. Others will find the images by Jessica Silk (a nude, via Gustav Klimt, no less) and Victoria Birkinshaw (a boxer) fascinating.

Photo: Dominika Zielinska

The photographs are somewhat eclectic, but are all by photographers in their twenties or thirties, none of whom appear in the recent book Contemporary New Zealand Photographers; that is to say, this lot are not the usual suspects, but the up and comers, the real contemporary photographers.

Photo: Dominika Zielinska

Photo: Dominika Zielinska

While, apparently, a few teething problems have arisen, getting things to look perfect first time round at this scale, backlit and in the open, and dealing with the elements—it pissed down for the unveiling—would be near impossible. The technical issues are now known and will be resolved, and the minor flaws do not affect my enjoyment of these images. I look forward to future exhibitions of photography in this great new venue. Go the Creative Capital.

Photos by Dominika Zielinska (daylight) and James Gilberd (night)

Filed under: Reviews by james | 8 May, 2008
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One of the things I love about film is, for want of a better word, its “tactileness”. You can pick up a negative, look through it, scan it, scratch it. Prints can be touched, turned over, laid out across the table, printed on textured paper, pinned up on a wall, written on, pasted in a journal.

Digital images, on the other hand, are increasingly never printed. My DSLR tells me that I’m up to 30,000 shutter clicks and of those, the images I’ve actually had printed number in the hundreds. And most of those would have been images of the children to send to less computer-savvy family members.

Pixels are rather hard to touch. Unless you convert those bits and bytes into atoms, all you can do is look at them in the flat, two-dimensional space of a computer monitor or screen. I’ve recently been playing with two different image viewers that bring that two-dimensional flatness to life a little more.

The first is PicLens, a plug-in to your browser. PicLens supports Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. It was amazingly easy to install. When viewing images on screen (in Flickr, PhotoBucket, Google images search, to name a few that it supports), you can click on a little arrow and bring up the PicLens display.

It really does feel three dimensional, and gives you the feeling that you are looking at a wall of images. It’s almost like you have shrunk to the size of the computer monitor. This way of viewing may or may not suit you, but I enjoy the way I can scroll through the images, left and right, very quickly. No clicking through page after page, no waiting for a page to load. It can be a little overwhelming, but it’s a good way of quickly surveying a large collection of images, or for locating a particular image or kind of image.

I also like how easy it is to get a sense of the vastness and the nature of someone’s collection. I can see all their images stretched out before me which leaves me with an impression that I could not get one image at a time.

Tiltviewer is similar, and in some ways, better. It’s a nice intuitive viewer that really makes you feel you could pick an image up off the screen and hold it. I like the way you can flip the image over to see details on the back, almost like you might a real photograph.

Tiltviewer is intended for a particular set of photos that you want to display in gallery-style, or a particular image set from Flickr, whereas PicLens allows you to view any set of images that you happen to be looking at, such as the results of a Google image search. Tiltviewer is also a little harder to install and configure, although not that difficult if you have any nouse.

I would not use either image viewer all the time, and especially not if I wanted to spend a long time studying or looking at images. There’s too much movement on the screen, the images move too easily, to be able to do that well.

Both viewers, however, are excellent for scanning, skimming, selecting, quick viewing, discovering, locating, exploring, wandering, and just playing. Try them and experiment with bringing digital images out of flatland, even if it really is just an illusion.

Filed under: Reviews by deb | 5 May, 2008
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How long does it take to read a page of a novel? A minute or two? An average length poem? Somewhat longer, and you’ll probably reread it. A photo? What about 1.5 seconds? Because, in my observation, that’s about how long many people spend looking at a photo. In a newspaper maybe? Yeah, but also in an art gallery. And I’m not specifically referring to Photospace gallery here; this observation has been made across a heap other photographic exhibitions in numerous galleries. An example; while at the Magnum Photo exhibition at Te Papa a few years ago, I observed many visitors’ eyes flick from photo to catalogue to next photo, mentally ticking off images as fast as they could: seen that one, seen that one…. This is a justifiable approach when confronted with an exhibition comprising several hundred photographs. I decided to tackle that show by spending my time looking closely at a much smaller selection of photos, knowing I couldn’t take in the whole thing. It worked, but I missed a lot too. (Buy the book and browse at leisure?)

We encounter too many photographs these days, in newspapers, magazines and on the internet and television, so it is sensible to ration our time spent looking at each one. Trouble is, this conditioning stays with us in the art gallery; we could try to leave it at the gallery door. Our larger institutional galleries have sometimes made this difficult, as above, by presenting exhibitions of too many works. It’s often about scale equalling importance.

The Slow Food movement, most people are aware, is in part a reaction to fast food. The idea is not that the food should take a long time to prepare, but that we slow down the pace of our busy life long enough to enjoy the meal, and in doing so benefit from the other things around that; the social aspects as well as the food itself, and the break from whatever else we’re doing. And it carries with it the concept of respect: for the food, the provider, the company and enjoyment of life in general. Think of this next time you encounter a photograph or exhibition of interest. Just make the time; it’s a creative act.

A 2003 exhibition at Victoria University’s Adam Gallery, Slow Release, featured some of the usual suspects; Peter Peryer, Anne Noble, Ann Shelton Fiona Pardington, Gavin Hipkins, and a couple of newbies (at the time); Fiona Amundsen and Yvonne Todd. ‘As a collective group, the works promise to hold the viewer in the act of looking and to reward with meaning.’ To live up to this claim in its publicity material, Slow Release was going to have to deliver a bunch of pretty damn good works. And, I’m happy to say, it did. (You thought I was going to rip into it, yes?) Liked the show, liked the works (mostly) and, more to the point, I liked the title. I took it with me to carry about for when I need to slow down to get the most out of some other exhibition. See http://www.victoria.ac.nz/adamartgal/exhibitions/2003/slowrelease.html

The point is that most photos that are worth spending your time with simply are not intended to impart their meaning, their content, their beauty, their poetry to you in 1.5 seconds, unless you’re Mr Spock of the starship Enterprise. Press photographers often shoot for impact and fast delivery, and fair enough, because it helps sell newspapers; but exhibiting photographers don’t always go for impact. Or if they do, there’s usually something more going on once the impact wears off, because it is a temporary quality. (Think of Christine Webster’s Black Carnival for impact, or Yvonne Todd’s series of beauticians in Slow Release.) The artists spend a lot of time, energy and resources to put the work in front of you, and so does the gallery; and that deserves the respect of the viewer. Yet I’ve often seen gallery visitors skim around a roomful of photos in less time than it took them to get from outside into the room. I wonder why they even bother. So they can tell their friends they saw the show?

This is intended as the first in a series of posts on Reading Photographs, and its message is simple: slow down and really look. Take your time and the photographs will begin to reward you. Apologies for the somewhat lecturing tone. I’ll back off it a little in Part II, if you’re still reading.

‘… to reward with meaning.’ I need to get into that last word. Photography is a kind of language, right? A photo can be likened to a poem, and most poets don’t just string words together because they like the sounds they make. Sure, that’s part of it, but poems have meaning, even if it differs for each reader. Photographs have meaning too; so how do we begin to extract it? Next time…, and the time after that….

Filed under: Uncategorized by james | 1 May, 2008
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Each year since 2001 the last Sunday in April has been designated World Pinhole Day. The website www.pinholeday.org is the place to go. The rules are simple: submit one lensless photograph per person, taken on the Sunday. There has been a workshop run at Photospace every year of WPHD, the first one run by Eddie Shaw, then Mark Marriott and I took over when Eddie moved back to England. Being in New Zealand, we get the jump on the rest of the world timezone-wise, usually getting the first photos on the exhibition site. This year is no exception. I can’t help wondering if the wonderful, dedicated people who run this website/event are getting a tiny bit sick of us. “[Groan] Oh Christ, not those guys again.”

 Anyway, the whole pleasure of partaking is in creating a photograph with a camera you’ve made yourself (we use Pringles cartons, the small ones) and developed in the darkroom. The first time I experienced this myself, in 2001, coincided with the arrival of a new digital camera for the photography business and trying to figure out how to run the thing. Making a camera out of a Planters cashew nut tin and getting a perfectly sharp, well-exposed and still interesting photo out of it was a real buzz, and in complete contrast to wrestling with the new digi.

The technology employed is 19th century (well, mid-20th, since we use resin-coated silver-gelatin paper for a negative) and the thinking much older. The camera obscura (described in the 5th century) vastly predates the photographic negative (William Henry Fox Talbot, 1830s) and the observation of light coming through a small hole into a dark room (or cave!) and creating a projected image of outdoors, reversed and inverted, is probably prehistoric.

The pleasure of doing something with photography that is hands on is, for me, greater than using a computer-driven hunk of plastic that is today’s digital camera, moving the image into a computer (more plastic) and then to a website. The digital image often never hits the ground; that is, it never has a material existence, so there doesn’t tend to be the associated strong feeling of having created something oneself; technology dilutes this feeling, perhaps because so much of the work has been done by others.

I guess I sound a bit old school here, but most people who do our workshops have never done anything except digital photography, and they get a huge buzz out of making the camera, discovering the characteristics of it and developing their own images in chemicals. The most common feedback is, ‘You wouldn’t believe you could take a photo with something as simple as this.’

Obviously there has to be some restriction on the size of the images stored on the www.pinholeday.org gallery pages, so you can’t really see the detail recorded. For example, in Bethany Campbell’s image (#5 ) the writing on the Sweet Mothers Kitchen sign is clearly readable in the original print.

And there are some fine photos taken using a pinhole on the front of a digital camera, but really… it’s cheating.

Filed under: Uncategorized by james | 27 April, 2008
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http://www.nzcp.com/ is the website. Have a look at the statement by NZCP Chairman Peter Ratner on the homepage.

Some of you may be aware that the NZCP and the National Portrait Gallery spent considerable time and energy over the last two years or so in an attempt to secure Shed 11 on Wellington’s waterfront as the permanent home for both organisations. For various reasons, this bid fell over late in 2007. I was disappointed. A prime location such as Shed 11 would have given the NZCP the opportunity to significantly raise the profile of photography in NZ. The  interest created by several well-attended exhibitions held there last year and in 2005 pointed to this (see nzcp website for those listings, under ‘exhibitions’).

As the Wellington City Council has declared the capital city to also be the cultural capital of NZ, it is a shame that they couldn’t have been more helpful and determined to find a solution to this problem. OK, perhaps Shed 11 wasn’t the best possible location; I don’t know, but as far as the WCC is concerned, the issue now seems to be a dead duck. It may happen, then, that some other city council will step up and offer the NZCP a proper home. Wanganui, perhaps, with its historical photographic associations. Palmerston North has plenty of spare buildings and is centrally located, and it’d give us arty types one other reason for visiting that desolate place, (as well as the wonderful Thermostat Gallery http://www.thermostat.co.nz/).

Anyway, I’m not going to say anything more about the NZCP at this stage, but rather call for your comments. What would you like to see in the future of this organisation? Let us know if you’re a current member, or a lapsed member (and why). Should the NZCP and Photo Forum http://www.photoforum-nz.org/ join forces and pool resources?

If you want to join the NZCP there’s a PDF form on their site. They could sure use your support right now, by the look of things. I am writing as a long term member, frustrated that my annual subscription has hardly yielded any more benefit than 4 issues of the NZCP Journal per year, which I could have simply purchased for a fraction of the subscription price. I have retained my membership because of wanting to support the organisation, and in the hope that one day we will enjoy the benefits of a New Zealand Centre for Photography that lives up to its name.

Filed under: Uncategorized by james | 24 April, 2008
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In 1998, ten years ago to the month, I purchased an off-the-shelf computer and Photoshop 4.0. Prior to that, if you wanted to do anything much with digital photography it was an expensive exercise, more the realm of professionals. Also at that time, for around a grand you could buy an amateur digital camera with about a megapixel of image resolution; useful for postcard-size prints. So let’s call this the tenth anniversary of digital photography for the masses.

Surprising, then, how relatively little serious art has been made using digital cameras and Photoshop in the last ten years. I’m talking about going beyond what was possible pre-digital; sure, anyone can take a picture and muck around with the various filters, a thing we’ve all done for fun. (The pre-digital equivalent was Cokin effects filters, something real photographers would never resort to.) But how often have you seen really interesting photography that utilises the possibility and control these now ubiquitous tools offer? I recall one show at the Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui, by Anthony Goicolea (thanks Microphen). He photographed himself to create casts of dozens in metres-long tableaux, to great effect.

At Photospace gallery, I have shown Siren Deluxe’s A Gender series; male and female nudes skilfully blended into hermaphrodites, photographed in domestic interiors; also Yvonne Westra’s Staged; black & white pigment prints of multiple photographs crafted into surrealistic, dreamlike scenarios. Steven McNichol’s Joel-Peter Witkin-inspired horrors used Photoshop to blend layers of man and beast, extending the subtlety and possibilities of his already considerable darkroom technique.

Two exhibitions in Wellington, one by Grant Sheehan at Bowen Galleries and the other by Brian Fernandes at Thistle Hall Gallery, feature works that began their lives as photographs of things or people and ended up as something quite different. In viewing both of these exhibitions, I asked myself the same question: why even start out with a photograph?

Photo: from Photo Synthesis by Grant Sheehan

In Grant Sheehan’s case, it seems natural. We know his photographs from numerous published books, most of which explore and record architecture and the urban landscape. Think cafés of NZ and the world, Wellington by evening light, historic lighthouses, etc. (And he has just won Cathay Pacific Travel Photographer of the Year – congratulations Grant.) So, after several decades of straight photography, I applaud him for moving out of his comfort zone and creating something completely different and unexpected. The digital images, printed to a medium size on metallic photo paper and pinned to the gallery wall, look like a trip back into 70s psychedelia. I can imagine Sheehan spending long hours glued to his computer with Hendrix, Cream and The Doors coming off vinyl at high volume for inspiration. I’m sure that if you spend the time looking into these artworks you’ll see all kinds of stuff, (like in the Camel cigarette packet illustration) but they’re not for me, personally.

While Sheehan used Photoshop’s facility for building and blending multiple image layers, Canadian artist Brian Fernandes used a computer algorithm of his own design. His digital artworks have titles like Thinking Man and Man and woman reclining; and one wonders how the images, which look like glowing spheres hovering in deep, black space, were ever human figures. Someone asked me, ‘What is it, a close-up of a nipple?’

Photo: from Pixel Nudes series by Brian Fernandes

In fact, the various coloured pixels that once formed a completely coherent image of a nude man, woman or couple photographed against a black background, were systematically rearranged according to the artist’s mathematical formula, number-crunched into something else entirely; the said floating sphere-like form. And they are beautiful things. After seeing the works at Thistle Hall, I asked Brian if he’d like to show them at Photospace for a while, so the four large pieces are now hanging in the studio lounge area. Come and have a gander, see what you think. (Brian’s statement about his process, I posted here.)

You’re waiting for me to ask this question, yes: is it photography? Well, I’m not asking it. (No, I just did, didn’t I.) What I mean is I’m not that interested in the answer. Does it matter what they are? Does it matter whether the viewer can visually perceive the photographic origin of the images? Do we need to categorise? I guess that if there wasn’t a photograph in there somewhere, then I wouldn’t be blogging about the things. You can create your own pixels in a few keystrokes, but you need some variation, some texture or line or shape to get a hold of before you can really start to play about. You need some origin. A photograph of something—anything—is an easy place to start from. You don’t even need to take your own. Brian Fernandes looks to have gone to some trouble to take his nudes, thus gaining true ownership of the images and their titles, but he could’ve just as easily started from a downloaded snap of Paris Hilton. What Grant Sheehan’s images started off as, only he knows. A café? A lighthouse?

I’m still figuring this out, thinking as I write, (you can tell?), and I guess I’m neutral here. Every image we see is manipulated to some degree; by the mind and attitude of its author, editor, or the political stance of the publication or context in which it appears; and particularly these days because, at some stage before we see it, it’ll be a bunch of pixels on some person’s computer screen. So why not go the full monty and take that manipulation to the nth degree, make something that is unrecognisable as its original form? OK, so it’s not photography. So what?

Sorry it’s been a while since my last rant. I was busy getting married and stuff.

Filed under: Documentary photography, Reviews, Uncategorized by james | 21 April, 2008
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