Ed Ruscha: Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962

Ed Ruscha. Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962

The 26 stations were on the highway from Los Angeles, where Ruscha lived, to Oklahoma City where his mother lived.  In an interview for Artforum, Feb 1965, he said "I have eliminated all text from my books – I want absolutely neutral material. My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of 'facts'…"   By 1982 he positioned the gas stations metaphorically, akin to the Stations of the Cross, but he was older then.  

Ruscha took 60 stations, edited them down to the 26 most un-eloquent photographs, and published them without any text.  Dave Hickey has written about the kind of numbness that happens when one drives, repetitively, long distances; he mentions John Baldessari's 1963 documentation of the back of every pickup truck he passed between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.  In 1985 I took a photograph out of the side window every 50 miles between Duncan, BC and Halifax, NS, a trip I had done several times.  Fifty was a round number, there were 72 slides, 2 rolls of film exactly – the curious thing was that the 50-mile slices missed every city, so it was a long trail of rocks, trees, horizons, mountains, trees, highway guard rails, trees and one very small town in New Brunswick.  The only narrative was the process, something that was very exciting.  All the deconstruction of motive and meaning came later.

Ruscha photographed the trail of gas stations for all sorts of painterly reasons: serials, ready-mades, a rejection of aesthetics, photography as surface linked to the surface conditions of pop art, the iconography of the everyday.  Plus, there was Kerouac and Cassidy's spooling out of On The Road, and there were cars, cars, cars.  John Chamberlain's crushed car sculpture, Billy Al Bengston's car-enamelled panels: the car was a material with which one could make art.  

dogs

Life would be unsupportable without them.

These Were Our Dogs, photographs from the Libby Hall Collection, Bishopsgate Institute.

set this to full frame:

Isabelle Hayeur: in the middle of nowhere

L'île, 1998, Paysages incertains / Uncertain Landscapes, 107 cm X 244 cm / 42" X 96"

Isabelle Hayeur:  Au milieu de nulle part

As part of Paris Photo at the Canadian Cultural Centre
5, rue de Constantine 75007 Paris
November 14, 2012 to March 22, 2013
Opening reception on November 13, 6h30 pm

From Isabelle Hayeur's press release:

"in the middle of nowhere", which, come to think of it, raises the idea of a strange encounter between geometry and geography. A paradoxical expression that has a wide range of connotations (from irony to poetry, from disenchantment to contemplation), it is used to refer to an object or a place from a relatively unplaceable space. Here, photography demonstrates its power to represent space-time continuums outside our everyday world, outside its flux, noise and inattention. The subjects seem to be uprooted, deprived of rooting in nature, of links to the earthly continuum. For Pascal Grandmaison, Isabelle Hayeur and Thomas Kneubühler, the framing is a crucial process that proposes another way of dividing up reality to take us elsewhere. Not towards some form of exoticism but, on the contrary and more colloquially, to the middle of nowhere.

« Au milieu de nulle part » est une expression qui pointe une chose ou un emplacement isolé, qui sort de l'ordinaire ou qui fait saillie de manière inopinée à partir de l'immensité plane. Littéralement une situation insituable – une absurdité, un paradoxe, une tromperie, un leurre, un éclat – qui représente un objet fabuleux pour la photographie. Les photographes Pascal Grandmaison, Isabelle Hayeur et Thomas Kneubühler, réunis ici pour la première fois, ont en commun cet intérêt manifeste pour ce qui n'est pas censé être au centre de l'attention. Par le cadrage photographique ils proposent un autre découpage du réel pour nous emmener ailleurs. Non pas vers quelque forme d'exotisme mais, bien au contraire et plus familièrement, « Au milieu de nulle part ».

seeing without eyes

The TopFoto caption: EU001059.jpg Chariots of Fire legend, Harold Abrahams, sprints blindfolded against a totally blind man at St Dunstan's. Abrahams lost the race, 20 June 1920. c. TopFoto

This is the banner photo that TopFoto is using during the Paralympics.  Clearly Harold Abrahams has lost himself spatially.  Without his eyes, he can't focus his mind and body in a straight line, despite the interesting guide flag thing.  
This is what was so interesting about the Paralympics – it is so much about the mind, and the intellect, driving everything forward.  Even the body, perfect and imperfect.

Mohatella Queens and South Africa in 1974

Umculo Kawupheli.  from the description on youtube, 'Original song with self-made video, featuring clips of the Queens back in the 1970s with their backing, Makhona Tsohle Band.'  

1974: just two years to the Soweto Uprising, 14 years since Sharpeville, 10 years since the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela.

Steve Bloom's photographs of this era were in this years London Festival of Photography in June. A BBC news documentary was made of Bloom describing some of the work:

Steve Bloom. Beneath the surface. Guardian Gallery, London, June 2012. All images copyright Steve Bloom/stevebloomphoto.com. Music by KPM Music. Slideshow production by Paul Kerley. Publication date 31 May 2012

the uses of luxury

Cecil Beaton. Vogue models in Charles James gowns in the ornate interior of French & Co, New York, 1948. Conde Nast Archive/Corbis

1948, a pointed demonstration of postwar elegance: Charles James evening gowns in one of the salons of French & Co, New York art dealers.  This tableau is meant to correct any sense that the rough levelling of society during the war was permanent.   It is like any sort of suppression, when the lid is lifted all that had previously been denied explodes in a kind of hyper-reality.  It is not the women who are desirable,  we hardly see their faces, it is the heavy satins and the room itself that are almost erotic in their complex, elegant ripeness.  

2012, Dior couture, photographed in a small grey corner, wrinkled grey flannel on the floor.  No mise-en-scène here, other than a possible insistence on luxury in the 1%  and who might, possibly, wear such dresses. The women are like flowers, their dark heads like stamens, the black eye of the pale poppy.  They are close, they break the frame of the photograph, they are defiant. 

Patrick Demarchelier. Dior Haute Couture, Spring/Summer 2011

the scale of a skirt

Cecil Beaton. Mrs Charles James, 716 Madison Avenue, New York, 1955

In this 1948 Cecil Beaton portrait, there is something very interesting in the scale of the voluminous, crumpled curtain next to the extravagant skirt of the Charles James gown.  James' wife, perversely, is made small by her surroundings.  

A similar thing happens in Tim Walker's 2006 photograph of Coco Rocha.  The glove, in all its versimilitude, seems the real scale.

Both photographers used huge rooms – eighteen-foot ceilings, twelve-foot windows, their volume, their inevitable emptiness.  Anything in these rooms, whether little gilt chairs or gilded youth, is made to seem as serious and as ephemeral as a butterfly.

Tim Walker. Coco Rocha and Giant Glove. London, England, 2006

Beaton at war

Cecil Beaton. 'Fashion is indestructible' — Digby Morton suit, in the ruined Middle Temple, 1941. British Vogue.

For Cecil Beaton architecture was an indisputable player in all his photographs, often much more complex than the subject.  It offered a narrative that transports the sitter, or the garments – it is all mise en scène. 

He was an official photographer in the North African campaign in WWII, and did a lot of work showing Britain's wartime manufacturing industries – shipyards, mineworkers, the effects of the Blitz, all a far cry from the fey pre-war portraits of society ladies in extravagantly romantic 18th century rooms where he was never against painting more frippery on the walls if it made the setting even complex, more fantastic.  I suppose the true complexity and brutality of war knocks some of that fantasy out of one.
 
These two iconic images are found in every book on Beaton there is.  It was startling, in 1941, for Vogue readers to be plunged into the shattered environment in which they were living: fashion magazines were and are for escape.  And the 1945 photograph of the Balmain coat and pants could come off the Sartorialist site today – that love of tragic urban street walls, so dark and layered, and the indomitable spirit of the women who can carry their own against them.

Cecil Beaton. Pierre Balmain Chinese Brown Woolen Coat and Trousers. 1945. British Vogue

reading fashion

Arjen van der Merwe. Malawi 2010 is a series about modern and traditional culture. From van der Merwe's website: 'The fashionable models, in dresses by Cathy Kamthunzi, and shoes of Pec Fashion symbolize modern Malawian culture. They are placed in a traditional setting.'

Barthes' seminal essay on the writing of fashion talked about it as a system of signifiers coded and intelligible only to readers already in the system.  It was written when fashion magazines showed images in black and white, low resolution.  Captions and text carried colour, texture, narratives of elegance, aspiration, possibility.  
We don't have such writing anymore, captions to fashion images are simply lists of the clothes.  The images carry everything – all the narratives of impossibility and unattainability.  As we are continually told, couture is for selling perfume, the only thing from Dior we can all afford.  

In the next issue of On Site, which is on the dialectic between the periphery and the laws of urbanism dictated from the core, Jason Price has written an essay on Arjen van der Merwe,  a photographer in Malawi whose fashion portfolio uses Malawian models and garments posed in village settings.  Price, living in Malawi, takes a rapier to this work, pointing out the coded signifiers that would perhaps pass us by.  

For me, living here, i.e. not in Malawi, the narrative lodged in these images is a return to the village, surely an act of despair for anyone who has managed to escape their small town for a life of infinite possibility in the city.  Despite being dressed in wonderful urban fashion and great shoes, beautiful sulky girls are shown lugging buckets from the pump, or making bricks, or sweeping dirt floors.  

As a foil to these images, Tim Walker's portfolio of photos for Vogue with Agyness Deyn in Namibia are just as provocative.  A particularly pale girl, beautifully dressed, appears to be stranded in a sand-filled abandoned house with a highly decorative, almost-dressed young Namibian man and a docile cheetah.  It is a set of signifiers that rings all the bells of colonial privilege that allowed Europeans to live in Africa, to act badly, and yet be protected from the violence they attributed to all the peoples in the periphery.  Walker's Namibia portfolio is on a very thin line between an ironic ode to that kind of wilful innocence and the casual belief that such relationships have an aesthetic, apolitical beauty.

Tim Walker. Agyness Deyn, Simon & Kiki the cheetah in sand storm, Kolmanskop, Namibia, Africa, 2011. for British Vogue.

aspect and prospect

[Jardin des] Tuileries : Mai 1906. N ° Atget : 5371. 1906. Photographie positive sur papier albuminé d'après négatif sur verre au gélatinobromure ; 21 x 17,5 cm (épr.). [Cote : BNF - Est. Eo 109a bte 1 ; n ° micr. T038908] \ Opaline 039802

Hossack mentions that before she went to the Tuileries, she looked at how Atget, Brassaï, Doisneau and Kertész had viewed the gardens.  One of Atget's images records the erotic curve of marble against sky, the bending of the figure to the curve of the railing separating the civilised from the relative mystery of the woods.  

The companion image looks at it from the other side, where all of a sudden we are aware of all the flimsy clutter of park life, the statue just one more piece of furniture.

Jardin des Tuileries : Mai 1906. N ° Atget : 5369. 1906. Photographie positive sur papier albuminé d'après négatif sur verre au gélatinobromure ; 21 x 17,5 cm (épr.). [Cote : BNF - Est. Eo 109a bte 1 ; n ° micr. T038907] \ Opaline 039801

Leslie Hossack, les Tuileries

Leslie Hossack. Waldeck-Rousseau Monument, Tuileries, Paris 2009

Leslie Hossack's photograph of the Waldeck-Rousseau Monument in the Tuileries.  As she notes, the gardens were designed by Le Nôtre in 1664, formal, rigourous, allées and monuments, swept gravel rather than humid lawns.  

Clearly she took the photo from the back, from the wall behind this monument.  Always looking at things to capture information about the thing itself rarely records how one gets to the thing, which in this case, is more interesting to us today than is the over-wrought statuary. 

Jon Rafman: what google sees

Jon Rafman. Google Street Views, 2010

Jon Rafman. Google Street Views, 2010

I was very sloppy with this post a couple of days ago: got the dates wrong and hadn't thought too deeply about these images.  What I quite liked about them was that they themselves had no meaning: caught by a camera programmed to photograph the street in nine different directions every ten feet or whatever it is, they simply are raw information. 

Jon Rafman chose, out of billions of such raw images, a collection that he ascribed some sort of role to, simply by selecting them.  Many of the people caught in many of the images know they are on camera and act up for it, others don't notice.  There are many traffic accidents that seem to have happened just as the Google van went by.  The stone house and the roadway, above, are simply beautiful ideas, which is why I selected them out of the hundreds on Rafman's 9-eyes.com.  There are so many selection filters one could apply, it turns viewers into search engine filters themselves. Which is of course how we all negotiate our own worlds.

Beth Dow, Powis Castle

Beth Dow. Terrace, Powis Castle, Wales. Platinum palladium print 18.5"x 16" image on 24" x 20" Weston Diploma paper. Edition of 25 + 3 Artist Proofs

Björn Braun, tree, material

Björn Braun, Untitled, 2009. Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe/Berlin.

From an article in Frieze:

'collages – usually unframed and mounted on the torn-off covers of hardback books'

'works use only what can be found in the original pictures: he cuts and tears things out, reforming or repositioning them in the finished piece.'

Zander Olsen, Tree/Line

Zander Olson. Untitled (Cader), 2008

Fred Herzog's Vancouver

Fred Herzog, Robson Street, 1957. Ink jet print, 51 x 34.6 cm; image: 45.9 x 29.5 cm. CMCP Collection. © Fred Herzog.

From the blurb on the Fred Herzog page at MOCCA: 'Herzog's passion for photography resulted in a large body of work depicting Vancouver during the postwar era, at a time when capitalism and consumer culture was burgeoning'.

And another:

Fred Herzog, Robson Street, 1958. Ink jet print, 51 x 34.6 cm; image: 45.9 x 29.5 cm. CMCP Collection. © Fred Herzog.This image was in the Globe & Mail book review section last week as there is a book out of Herzog's work: Grant Arnold. Fred Herzog, Vancouver Photographs.  D&M, 2011.

Herzog was German, worked as a seaman after WWII and in 1952 emigrated to Canada when he was just 22.  He became a medical photographer, and taught at UBC and Simon Fraser.  Herzog has a huge following in Vancouver as he documented a city unrecognisable now.  But I can recognise the prim little lady waiting for the bus, her hat, her gloves, her stick and sensible lace up shoes.  My childhood in Victoria was peopled with such tidy creatures who dressed to go downtown. Of course, downtown then had butchers and cake shops, lunch counters and ladies' dress shops. No malls, few cars, excellent bus service, a kind of public propriety on the sidewalk.  The fellow who has wounded his chin badly while shaving and wearing an undershirt on the street, and smoking, and having a sprained wrist: clearly a doubtful presence at the edge of our little lady's world. But at least he had shaved to go out.  Stubble was a signal that one had really given up.

wood matches and plastic lighters

The remains of an albatross © Photo: Chris Jordan - http://www.chrisjordan.com

Went to buy some matches yesterday, looked all over the supermarket, none to be found.  Asked, told that all 'smoking paraphernalia' was over in the gas bar.  Trudged through the slush to the gas bar, asked for a box of matches: what a strange request.  The girl had to find a ladder to get them from a locked top shelf.  I could buy two huge boxes or ten little boxes, no the packages can't be divided.  
I said, this is winter, we light candles and kindling; matches aren't smoking paraphernalia, they light fires.  Here is the answer: people use disposable lighters or, for candles, those long butane filled wands.  

Which is better for this world, a match made of wood or cardboard, or a lighter made of plastic, metal and lighter fluid?

Midway Atoll is located in the North Pacific Gyre, one of five floating continents of plastic litter and chemical and organic waste.  Midway is an albatross colony: pieces of plastic, about the size of disposable lighters evidently look similar to squid, the main component of an albatross diet.  This plastic is eaten and then regurgitated to feed albatross young.  Who die.  The corpse decays and as it was stuffed with plastic, a tidy collection of matter incapable of decay is left on the beach.  

Plastic never goes away, it just gets smaller and smaller and thus is ingested by smaller and smaller animals.  Who die.  And while we seem to be able to sample the debris in each of the oceanic gyres, there is so far no solution for its collection.

The photo above is by Chris Jordan, who has made a film about Midway.  I heard about it on Radio Netherlands' Earth Beat a few weeks ago. 

Louis Helbig: aestheticising the unconscionable

Louis Helbig. Bitumen Slick N 57.19.28 W 111.25.44 Syncrude Aurora North

Helbig writes of the image above: Booms confining bitumen floating near the edge of Syncrude's Aurora North tar pond.  This is where industry suffered its most serious massive public relations setback in the spring of 2008 when someone alerted the public and the authorities to flocks of ducks landing on its surface.  In this particular incident about 1,600 ducks were killed.  Syncrude was convicted in 2010 of breaching both federal and provincial environmental reglations.

He has a series of aerial photographs of the oil sands region, and although his view is activist, as one can see from the captions, the images are beautiful.  How is it that our visual acuity has been trained to find abstraction so sublime.  Context is removed and we gaze at such images with the appreciation other eras gave to flowers or girls with pearl earrings.  This is precisely what is so dangerous about the removal of context, scale, consequences and facts.  They are removed.  

We need people such as Louis Helbig to keep explaining not just his photographs, but the abstract nature of the oil sands enterprise itself.  Whatever it does there is a diagram on the map with pipelines dotted in to Texas, maybe to Prince Rupert and on to China.  It is a series of mirrored glass office towers in Calgary and Houston. It is every plastic bag we throw hopefully into the recycling bin, it is the cloud of exhaust everytime we start our cars. 

Fernando Brízio at the Antigo Convento da Trindade

From EXD'11 in Lisbon.  Click on the image to go to David Pereira's beautiful sequence of photographs of this exhibition.

David Pereira, photographer. Don't Look Back | Fernando Brízio | Desenho Habitado | Antigo Convento da Trindade

Donovan Wylie 2: the architecture of war