Martin Parr - exhibition in Bristol - 1

The photographer Martin Parr is having an exhibition in Bristol. He is the first photographer of note that I studied with though at that time he had only just joined Magnum as an associate; now he is a full member and head of Magnum UK.

There is an exhibition talk and I have been asking other OCA students to join me there via the OCA Flickr group ...

"An exhibition of Martin Parr's work is going to be on show in Bristol this autumn.

Parr is a leading UK photographer, head of Magnum UK, whose work attracts a lot of controversy; he is of interest not just to photographers but also students of visual culture.

Actually, anyone with an interest in contemporary Britain especially Bristol might like it ...

Any other OCA students interested in meeting up there?

Amano"


REVIEW
www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jun/12/martin-parr-b...

DETAILS
events.magnumphotos.com/exhibition/bristol-and-west-photo...

BOOKLET download
www.intellectbooks.co.uk/File:download,id=424/2.martin%20... 




Henri Cartier-Bresson, the great French photographer, was said to be "highly suspicious" of Martin Parr's work. The suggestion is that he is laughing at his subjects rather than documenting them.

Parr's photographs make me laugh and yet I wonder why.

Perhaps it is that by holding up very ordinary scenes for display, he is relieving us of the misery they tend to inflict upon us!? Perhaps he weighs on our capacity for guilt which is why some find him disturbing. Personally, I find his images full of insight and humour.


It seems easy to go over the top about Parr and so a little information might help to make any OCA conversation less backchat and more constructive.


Brian aka Noble Savage wrote ...


Where do you see opposition to Martin (Parr) Amano? He's always been controversial, particularly within Magnum, but I haven't heard anyone say he should go off and do something else.
I cringe rather than laugh at his photos, but both are valid emotional responses.
I enjoyed hearing him speak a few months back when he was very sharp with people who tried to praise him in intellectual terms, eg "how does your work achieve such a marvellous three-dimensionality?" - "what do you mean, it's a photo, it's only two dimensional". Inspirational.. 


I replied ...


Well, I have heard opposition to Martin Parr voiced on OCA days.

Was it not you Noble Savage who did a post about Parr's portrait day when he was photographing people for a tidy yet not unreasonable sum? You were quite surprised I think by some of the reactions to that post.

Parr is controversial for sure. I find myself trying to understand my reaction to his work ... 


Brian continued ...


It was me who started that post, and I said I admired his marketing genius. At the end of that thread I also said "All my posts express my respect for Parr in some area. I also said I'd swap places with him anytime."

I was only surprised that people hadn't read my posts fully before metaphorically putting words in my mouth.

In a different post I also expressed admiration. I'm a big fan, perhaps just not unconditionally so.


I continued ...


Have just purchased a copy of Martin Parr by Val Williams (about £20) which contains images as well as a good critique of his work. I would like to develop a more informed view of this controversial leading UK photographer who seems to have a foot in both the documentary and the art world.

OCA tutor, Peter Haveland comments that some students particularly more mature ones tend to overlook contemporary work for more traditional or proven material. I know that when I went to Bradford this year for the OCA view of From Back Home, I had to see the Fay Godwin exhibition; the difference between the two exhibitions was striking.


A interview with Parr and a brief review of the exhibition that opened yesterday ... !

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/8723045/The-... 




I read Val Williams' book about Martin Parr (published by Phaidon). She starts by saying that Parr's photos "can make us feel very uncomfortable" which seems to be a fairly typical approach and one that I do not share. Apparently, Parr is good friends with Bruce Gilden which does not surprise me much yet reminds me of that other side to Parr, the side that is as tough and as solid as the metal and glass in his camera. I know I do not want to intrude into people's lives the way Gilden does on the streets of NYC and yet I don't see Parr as such a merciless snooper.


One of Parr's books that he sees as one of the most important is Common Sense; the cover shows a rusty model of the globe which is being used as a money box, a reflection of his "growing preoccupation with globalism and the corporate culture". Val Williams also describes this book as "violent", a violence that is increased by showing objects of possible veneration such as a cup of tea in a willow-patterned tea cup with more grotesque object of consumerism.


By 2001, Parr was quoted as saying that his best photography was behind him rather than in front of him. It is not easy to draw conclusions about him because his work is so diverse and complex in meaning. One might call him a post-modern photographer perhaps since he pays little attention to the so-called rules of photography in which composition is much more formal and colours not so gaudy.

Post-modernism (exhibition at the V+A)

Here is a link to the photographic display ...
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/s/signs-of-a-struggle-photography-in-the-wake-of-postmodernism/

OCA informal meeting of students in the South West

M5 Somerset : photo made without my looking through the viewfinder

Thanks to Teresa Milk from Torquay who arranged a meeting of students at the Royal West Academy in Bristol. This is how at 10.30 a.m before the gallery began to fill up, 7 of us (3 men, 4 women) found themselves around a table sipping away at their bevvies and chatting.

The RWA in Bristol with Charity, a statue installation by Damien Hirst, standing outside

I was not sure I would be able to come until more or less the last minute. I had also had reservations about meeting in an art gallery. I am not one of those photographers who wants their work to be taken seriously as art rather I would like it to be accepted as photography; "photography for photography's sake!"

no sign for photography magazines !

Before I arrived at the gallery, I dropped into Smiths, the newsagents, and was struck to see there was no actual mention of photography in their extensive shelves of magazines; the current term is "imaging". This further stirred my concerns about photography as a medium.

a piece of art work in the academy that did interest me!

What would the day be like without a tutor to give some input? It was slightly haphazard as we lost each other on more than one occasion but the RWA is not a big place and there was a natural gravitation towards Papdilo, the cafe there!

Tutors in fact were one topic of conversation. Are they really worth the course fee? Do they earn their keep? It seems tutors do vary quite a bit in the way they respond to their students. There was a feeling that tutors do not go in for personal communication with their students over the practicalities of doing a course and personal issues the students might be facing over caring for a senile parent for instance. Tutors can also be rather brief when commenting on the work of students. Personally, I have got on fine with the tutors I have had although one did send me an introductory letter for a course different to the one I was doing!! I find it has taken me time to get into the mode of studying again.

A part of the course is keeping either a log book or an online blog. At first, I found the software difficult to handle and still find Blogger a bit tricky. Wordpress can be a good alternative; this software is available for download and so one does not have to be online all the time.

Tutors had another criticism thrown at them concerning their criticism of contemporary artists! Martin Parr is a leading UK photographer yet gets criticism as does the doyenne of landscape photographer, Charlie Waite. One can find oneself accused of being too commercially orientated rather than producing one's own work and finding style rather than borrowing it. This strikes me as a bit of a conundrum. I remember once being criticised for producing commercial images that were being used to advertise a holiday; I did not tell the photographer that I had actually made the photographs before the idea came up for the holidays and there were also in black and white, not a usually a choice for for holidays. The photographer happened to be well known and widely respected so I took the criticism on board in a kind of respective way but found myself questioning it too. I guess if you have a Marxist outlook then anything that looks like it might sell is considered inappropriate.

One topic that drew me to the day was UVC (Understanding Visual Communication) a course that I have considered doing. This sounds really interesting but I wonder about studying Mark and Freud; what about Darwin whose thinking is becoming more relevant as science continues to verify his theories? Both Mark and Freud have been discredited by those who have followed in their footsteps. UVC seems intellectual though and not really in tune with the more intuitive approach of photography which happened thanks to scientific theory not aesthetic theorising. Liz Wells writes, "Theory informs practice." yet without practice there would be no theory. Still, UVC is clearly a fascinating line of study and as a photographer I feel the need to understand theory to some extent.

Reading around one's topic can be rewarding even if one does go off at tangents thanks to the mass of available information on the internet.

The Landscape module of photography might seem attractive yet it is also demanding. One needs to photograph the same location at different times of the year and even different times of the day which can be very time consuming.

OCA student informal meet at the RWA: students from left to right -
Theresa and Dorothy then Ushma, Peter,  Sally? and David.

As the conversation continued, I got up and walked around the room to look at the large format inkjet prints on the walls of buildings at night from different places around the world; the cost of one print was £320 and there were a couple of signs to inform one of this but no sign containing the name of the photographer although a man at the entrance to the museum selling tickets to the exhibitions did mention it to me.

sign for The Ballroom Spy exhibition

There was one exhibition I did want to see since it was about dance, a subject I have covered quite extensively in Asia, and also because it also contained paintings of dance; it was interesting to see photographs and paintings hung in the same gallery as part of the same exhibition since the dialogue between these tow art forms has always interested me, largely as a way to define my own photographic practice.

The exhibition was called "The Ballroom Spy" and was about ballroom dancing and the world this particular form of dance encompasses. A lady on duty at the exhibition told me that the two were good friends and admired each others work; in fact, the artist Jack Vettriano uses the photographer's images to paint from. The photographer Jeanette Jones is a trained dancer herself and uses this knowledge to help her make images that relate to particular points in the dance moves.

HABITAT - a chain store that is closing !

the rear view of Charity by Damien Hirst - coins spilling from the collection box
could be seen around the base of the statue and on the pavement outside 

I started my blog at a cafe further up Whiteladies Road

Shaw exhibition at Laycock 1 ; Guardian review by Maev Kennedy

George Bernard Shaw, who frequently posed for his own pictures, often experimented with lighting and early colour printing. Photograph: LSE/National Trust

George Bernard Shaw will be exposed, stripped bare as never before, when the contents of cupboards and drawers, albums and boxes crammed into his last home go on display for the first time – the thousands of photographs that were the Nobel laureate's other great passion in life.

An exhibition of original prints will open at the National Trust's Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock, Wiltshire, on Thursday, while the guardian of Shaw's photographic archive, the London School of Economics, has mounted anonline exhibition as well. Both have astonishing images, including several of Shaw naked, apart from his whiskers.

From 10,000 images, mostly printed by Shaw, Roger Watson, curator of the Lacock exhibition, has chosen a startling self-portrait of the playwright lying on a sofa, lit by a single overhead lamp, naked apart from a strategically placed book. Shaw's long, skinny body could be a medieval tomb carving, apart from the hints in the shadows of a 20th-century background.

"It really is a very striking and unusual image," Watson said. "A more conventional photographer would have cropped the lamp out of the print, but to me that makes the picture. "

Karyn Stuckey, the curator at the LSE who has been cataloguing the vast collection and created the online exhibition, was taken aback when she discovered the image of a naked Shaw bending over to set his camera, reflected in a mirror. "I was ploughing through hundreds of slightly dull prints, and expecting something entirely different to come up next, and I suddenly went 'Whoa, what's that?'"

Shaw, who took up photography in 1898, frequently photographed himself nude, and also posed on a beach as Rodin's Thinker for the actor Harley Granville Barker, but admitted "I merely looked constipated".

Both exhibitions are full of biographical hints for the curious. There are relatively few photographs of men, but many of beautiful and sensuously photographed – if fully clothed – women friends. They include the actor Lillah McCarthy and the even more ravishing Beatrice Webb, co-founder of the LSE with the Shaws and her husband and fellow Fabian, Sidney Webb. His most famous leading lady, Mrs Patrick Campbell, was captured lying in bed. He wrote to her: "I want the lighter of my seven lamps of beauty, honour, laughter, music, love, life and immortality", but the relationship smouldered almost entirely on paper.

There are many photographs of his wife, Charlotte. Long before his writing made him rich, Shaw's money problems were solved by marrying the Irish heiress in 1898. One frank portrait shows her looking trustingly straight to camera: on the back he captioned it "nee Charlotte Payne-Townshend Mrs Bernard Shaw" – then crossed that out and wrote "The green-eyed millionairess".

By the time Shaw died at Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire in 1950, aged 94 – after falling out of an apple tree he was trying to prune – he had accumulated 10,000 prints and more than 10,000 negatives.

The house and contents were left to the National Trust. In 1979 the photographs, still uncatalogued and many on mouldering and potentially dangerous old film, were transferred to the archives of the London School of Economics for safe storage. In a marathon joint LSE and National Trust project all have been conserved, digitised – almost crashing the LSE website – and catalogued over the past two years.

Shaw was typically writing thundering reviews of photographic exhibitions long before he started photograpy. Stuckey and Watson agree that the best were taken with Shaw's earliest cameras, when he was experimenting with lighting and early colour printing, and creating strikingly composed shots that demanded careful planning and minutes of immobility from his subjects, rather than the snapshots he produced when he bought a Leica and began using 35mm film in the 1930s.

A handful of his photographs were reproduced or exhibited in his lifetime, but thousands had never been seen by anyone since Shaw last looked at them.

"He's not perhaps a first-rank photographer, but he's very high in the second rank, at least in his early days," Watson said. "If somebody brought these in and said they were their grandfather's and asked if we would exhibit them, the truthful answer would probably be no. I'd say they'd be lovely to have, lovely to go through the albums, but I'm not sure how many outsiders would come to see them. But as the work of Shaw, they're a different story entirely. I think people will be fascinated."

George Bernard Shaw: Man & Cameraman, will be showing at the Fox Talbot museum, Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, from 7 July to 11 December 2011

Paul Graham : OCA day at the Whitechapel Gallery 21.05.11

OCA day at the Whitechapel Gallery for the Paul Graham exhibition

Saturday 21’st May 2011

had to wait about 20 minutes to purchase a ticket for the Underground
during which time I worked out exactly how to get there
as the direct route was not operating!

This day with fellow OCA students and Gareth Dent, OCA CEO, was a chance not just to meet other students one knew as internet presences but also to see an important exhibition by the contemporary photographer Paul Graham and be guided around it by Michael Lowton, an artist and member of the gallery staff. 

view from a tube train - London 2011

In spite of chaos on the London Underground, we all eventually met up outside the gallery and were welcomed by ML who took us straight into the exhibition as soon as we had been tagged with a light blue Whitechapel Gallery sticker.

Gareth Dent (right of centre) meets students outside the Whitechapel Gallery

Paul Graham, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(photographer)), winner of the 2009 Deutsche-Borse prize for his contribution to photography as a whole, is a fine art photographer although there is a documentary feel to much of his work. The exhibition is entitled “Paul Graham Photographs 1981-2006” and was described as "a mid-career survey" since the term "retrospective" would have implied that his work is finished which it obviously is not.

The exhibition concerns itself with "the idea of looking at things" though obviously this is only one way of considering the work; some visitors might see it in a different light. Personally, I found myself struck by the clever combination of the aesthetic and the documentary allowing one to be both informed by the work and also given the space to wonder about it. Some documentary work more or less forces one to think about certain subjects such as apartheid for instance, while here the viewer although directed towards certain subjects such as unemployment or the American Dream, is not being forced into a particular viewpoint. Graham’s work allows one to reflect. He had actually trained as a micro-biologist rather than an artist.

By photographing people watching television, the photographer has chosen to consider his immediate surroundings rather than a far away location.

One body of work entitled “A1: The Great North Road” shows Graham at the start of his career, drawing heavily on the work of American photographers who traveled the roads of their country in search of images that might encapsulate America. An obvious influence here is William Eggleston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Eggleston) who was one of the first photographers to make colour photography an acceptable medium yet the work of a Swiss photographer, Robert Frank, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frank) who worked in black and white and created a book about his journey across America is no doubt another strong influence. Paul Graham’s conscious use of colour here with deep blue skies and yellowish buildings red interiors is quite obvious.

Another early body of work made between 1984 and 5 and called Beyond Caring was when I first became aware of him as a photographer. There was some talk at the time of Graham’s apparently trivial treatment of such a mundane subject as unemployment with further questions about the odd angles and perspectives this work produced, a result of often photographing surrepticously in government buildings of subjects who would have probably been reluctant subjects. One image that shows a child in pink surrounded by seated unemployed people caused a stir. Graham’s use of colour was considered frivolous in this situation, black and white would be much more appropriate yet Graham has never been the type of photographer to blindly follow in other’s footsteps.

The prints we see in the exhibition here are digitally produced; at the time, they would have been produced chemically in the darkroom and would have looked quite different. One wonders how much present day printing influences the impression we now have of these images.

Another series of images called Troubled Land (The social landscape of Northern Ireland) made between 1984 and 1986 shows the natural beauty of this part of the world. However, in each image there is a small area of detail, what Barthes might have considered as a punctum, that indicates a disturbing element such as soldiers searching a car; these throw light as well as perspective on the troubles Northern Ireland faced for a long time and has still not entirely rid itself of. In a book, these details are easily missed and this is one example of a gallery bringing out the best in a photograph particularly when a large format camera has been used to make the originals.

“Empty Heaven” is a series of images made in Japan between 1989 and 1995, which are said to contain “ideas of denial and concealment” with hidden signifiers in the work. The “hierachal and structured society” of Japan is mentioned as well as “suppressed memories of the past” evident in a photograph of an atomic bomb explosion. There is a photograph of a girl with a white face, apparently mimicking a Geisha, a tree at night wrapped up and twinned uncomprehendingly with the profile of a man’s slightly acned face … it is not easy to understand what these images are actually about. The superficiality of modern Japan perhaps though the onlooker may not draw such a conclusion since Japan is not an easy society to understand.

Ceasefire is a series of images made between 6 and 8’th of April 1984 to record a cessation of hostilities in a European war zone and shows only the sky with clouds; every image though is different with the sun wanly shining through formations of cloud while other images near the end of the sequence do not reveal the presence of the sun at all and are much darker in appearance.

New Europe is series of images that record an important part of Europe’s development when it was merging into one very large country rather than an economic union as had been the early idea. There is a touching photograph of a man looking at a modern city with its’ high rise buildings yet it does not take long to notice that this man is missing an arm. The New Europe has come at a price and is not so good as it might be considered as other photographs show drug taking, prostitution and women smoking. A slightly techie discussion took place among a few of us as to how a photograph of a well illuminated pillar with a crown of barbed wire wrapped around it, managed to be made with a dark background; I reckoned it was by using a flash probably at night but possibly by day and while most others thought it was a flash shot owing to the hard shadows, one wondered exactly how the background had been kept in the shadow ... perhaps it was further away that one imagined or the camera was close and a small aperture had been used!?

Another set of images called End of an Age 1996 to 1998 are described as a “candid portrait of a generation reaching adulthood on the cusp of the new millennium”. Not one of the subjects portrayed is looking at the camera and while some are sharply defined by well exposed and closely focused images, others are unfocused and present a fuzzy view. All the images are printed very large, filling the walls in this part of the gallery and were photographed in European nightclubs. There is a hedonistic feel to these images and interestingly, they have been more widely used without permission by companies such as Gucci than any other of his other images.

American Night, photographs made in North America between 1998 and 2002, is full of innuendo like much of Graham’s work. Here we see over-exposed images containing only a faint impression of detail and yet enough for one to understand visually what is happening in the image; others are printed very dark while still retaining detail. Black and White is a theme here that seems to be under exploration as black people feature in the black images while rich and poor is another subject also under the spotlight. There is an image perfectly exposed of a suburban house which seems to perfectly portray the American Dream though this body of images seems to be as much about the American nightmare of consumerism and racial tension. As with much of Paul Graham’s work, the images are untitled but place names and dates are given such as New York 1998 etc.

One might ask with this body of work as to why some images are greatly over-exposed though not with loss of actual detail while others are very dark and some are right in between. There are figures in some images but these are mostly solitary and a few are wheel chair bound, a comment on lives lost in battle zones elsewhere perhaps, an apparently necessary strategy to maintain the “heaven” of America.

A “Shimmer of Possibility” is another set of images made between 2004 and 2006 and continues the American theme. It includes the series of photographs made of a man mowing a lawn outside a hotel in Pittsburgh where the photographer was staying in 2004. This was unplanned and yet the session produced a remarkably varied group of images as did another set of a flower vendor in San Francisco (2006) in which the images are by and large unexposed showing him in the street, close up with different facial expressions and also his hands that grasp the flowers.

At the end of the exhibition, there is a collection of Paul Graham’s photo-books behind glass; one wants to take them out and handle them, look again at the images one has seen and see them juxtaposed with others one has not.

Gareth Dent (far right) and other students in the Archive Room
at the Whitechapel Gallery London

After viewing the exhibition we are taken to Gallery 5, the Archive Room, and here are a completely different set of photographs by Ian Berry, a Magnum photographer well known for his images of England. These are all in black and white, a sharp contrast to the colour of Paul Graham and a reminder that although they might be considered contemporaries since they worked at the same time for some of the time, they are from different eras of photography. Ian Berry was actually commissioned by the Whitechapel Gallery to photograph the area nearby for a book that never happened although an exhibition did. His beautifully crafted photographs of a time of great social change, hang on the walls of this room and reveal a world that is no longer observable.

In regard to Paul Graham's work, that which I found most interesting was not in the exhibition but in a book of his called Film which was published only this year. It is a list of extreme close ups of the crystals of different film makes, qualities that give it its’ distinctive character; the various emulsions photographed are all recorded by name at the back of the book. This is not only a very colourful and attractive book with images given full bleed on the pages, it is also a historical document as many of these films have now been discontinued. A book for techies? Hardly, as with so much of Graham’s work there is a curious blending of the scientific and the aesthetic which for me is the hallmark of good if not great photography, a view that I might well be held to account for by those who think it is all about art!!?

This brings my account to the next part of the day ... the discussion about the exhibition over a beverage, kindly provided for by the OCA.

chat with Gareth Dent about the art of photography

I have met Gareth Dent, the CEO of the OCA, on a number of OCA study days.

We discussed the photography course with Gareth saying that the modules aimed to take the student beyond technical considerations to consider photography as an art.

I don't doubt this approach for a moment yet feel that photography is going too far in the direction of art which allows people to use the medium because it is seen as an easy form of expression. To actually convey one's vision through photography is however not easy since one can not rely completely on the obvious attractiveness of the medium. I mention Steve Edwards from the Open University whose book A Very Short Introduction to Photography considers the photograph as both art and document.

Studying the character of great photographs is part of the art of photography approach.

Sometimes photography, particularly modern photography which no longer tries to use artistic conventions, can be depressing and it is the body of the work that needs considering rather than individual images.

One needs to be aware of entrenched attitudes within the medium of photography particularly one's own.

more thoughts on the art of photography

I wonder whether the art of photography might be the ability to enhance even manipulate photographs in Photoshop. Here, colours can be altered as well as contrast and brightness.

However, before one starts to use Photoshop as an artistic tool, one needs to be able to make good quality photographs which can then be worked on in Photoshop.