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Looking at one’s self, looking at other people, voyeurism and surveillance became central concerns for many photographers.
From the article How we looked, BJP 24/06/09.
The act of looking and the question of the (male) gaze became central in the 1970s: In Laurie Anderson’s work Object/Objection/Objectivity (Fully Automated Nikon) she photographed the men who verbally assaulted her in the streets of New York, later covering their eyes with a white band in the finished images, negating and criminalising the male gaze.
Our cultures’ obsession with sex and sexuality is very apparent in most of the commercial images surrounding us. The question of portraying (sexual) identity, the balance between subject/object, how we look and see each other, is as relevant as ever.
Man Ray (August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976):
Diane Arbus (14 March 1923 – 26 July 1971):
Helmut Newton (31 October 1920 – 23 January 2004):
Nobuyoshi Araki (born May 25, 1940):
Sally Mann (Born May 1, 1951):
Bettina Rheims (born December 18, 1952):
Richard Kern (born 1954):
(You can see some fascinating footage of Kern shooting girls here.)
Cindy Sherman (born Jan 19, 1954):
Catherine Opie (born 1961):
Juergen Teller (born 1964):
Wolfgang Tillmans (born 15 August 1968):
More on the subject of identity and gender in the latest issue of Danish Photo Mag Filter – for fotografi #3, Theme: Normality.
When looking at last years prize winners for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in London, I came across this image, by Hendrik Kerstens. I really like how he’s made the plastic bag look like a sculpture. It’s so simple, but a very strong image that kept popping up in my mind since I saw it. The girl in the photographs is Kerstens daughter.
“Hendrik Kerstens was born in 1956 in The Hague, Netherlands. Winner of the 2001 Dutch Panl Award Kerstens is a self-taught photographer who initially turned to a model close at hand, his daughter Paula. Since starting to photograph Paula in 1995 Kersten’s work has been exhibited in over 40 exhibitions across Europe and the United States. In his portraits Paula is always depicted as being austere, serene and illuminated with a characteristic ‘dutch’ light. In September he will open his first solo New York exhibition at the Witzenhausen Gallery. Kersten’s short-listed portrait was conceived in New York when he noticed the excessive amount of plastic bags given away in shops. As a humorous reaction to this environmental problem he photographed the plastic bag in the style of a seventeenth century cap.”
Every day Flak Photo features a new photo, which shows up on my Facebook Home page. Today it was this image by Susan Worsham. There’s some really interesting, odd and inspiring work on her website.
“SOME FOX TRAILS IN VIRGINIA
This series of photographs is taken in and around Virginia, the place in which I grew up. The title comes from a book written by my father’s ancestor, to show the lineage of the Fox family in Virginia. For my own purpose, it acts as a metaphorical map, of the rediscovered paths of my childhood home.
At the age of 34, I came back to Virginia to care for my mother, who died shortly after my return. As the last of my family passed, I turned my lens to old friends, and their new families. I photographed the house in which I grew up. The man that lives there now houses snakes in my father’s old office, and rests them in my old bedroom, while he changes their cages. My mother always promised that there were no snakes in my room, and now that she is gone, there are.”
Martin Parr‘s been incredibly productive and published a ton of books. I love his sense of humour and the way he captures the ordinary and the extreme, a sort of concentrated englishness. Looking for the point of vulnerability of society, as I think he puts it here:
“Martin Parr (born 23 May 1952 in Epsom, Surrey) is a British documentary photographer, photojournalist and collector. He is known for his photographic projects that take a critical look at modern society, specifically consumerism, foreign travel and tourism, motoring, family and relationships, and food.
Parr wanted to become a photographer from the age of 14 and cites his grandfather, an amateur photographer, as an early influence. From 1970-1973 he studied photography at the Manchester Polytechnic. In 2008 he was made an Honorary Doctor of Arts at MMU (the former Polytechnic) in recognition for his ongoing contribution to photography and to MMU’s School of Art. He married Susan Mitchell in 1980 and is father of a daughter named Corinne Manion (born 1986).
Parr began work as a professional photographer and has subsequently taught photography intermittently from the mid-1970s. He was first recognised for his black and white photography in the north of England (Bad Weather (1982) and A Fair Day (1984) ) but switched to colour photography in 1984. The resulting work, Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton, was published in 1986. Since 1994 Parr has been a member of Magnum Photos. Recent work has included a collaboration with designer Paul Smith in Ilford, capturing people wearing Smith’s Autumn/Winter 2007 collection.”
I first became aware of Joel Sternfeld when he was shortlisted for The Citigroup Photography Prize at The Photographers Gallery in London, in 2004. They were showing some very odd travel sceneries, like this one of an exhausted renegade elephant, from June 1979.
Later I went and got Stranger Passing signed by Sternfeld.. I felt so nervous as I was waiting in line, when I finally got there, I managed to tell him, that I wanted to copy him. He wrote in my book: “To Alex, with all good wishes for your photography. Picasso said, “I never borrow – I steal.”
“Joel Sternfeld, (b. 1944, New York City), is widely regarded as one of the most influential and important fine-art color photographers in the world, noted for his large-format documentary pictures of the United States and establishing color photorgaphy as a respected artistic medium. He has many works in the permanent collections of the MOMA in New York and the Getty in Los Angeles. He has also “raised” and influenced an entire generation of color photographers including Andreas Gursky who borrows many of Sternfeld’s techniques and approaches.
Sternfeld earned a BA from Dartmouth College and teaches photography at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He began taking color photographs in 1970 after learning the color theory of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers. Color is an important element of his photographs.
Another book, On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam (1997), is about violence in America. Sternfeld photographed sites of recent tragedies. Next to each photograph is text about the events that happened at that location. From 1991-1994 Sternfeld worked with Melinda Hunt to document New York City’s public cemetery on Hart Island [1]. A book, “Hart Island” was published in 1998 [2]. Sternfeld has also published books about social class and stereotypes in America (Stranger Passing [2001]), an abandoned elevated railway in New York (Walking the High Line [2002]), and a book titled Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America ([2006]). A new book containing close-up portraits of delegates debating global warming at an United Nations conference in Montreal, titled When It Changed, is currently slated for publication in July 2007.”
I’m a huge fan of William Eggleston. His images have this sort of poetic imperfection about them, the way the objects are positioned slightly off beat, curious, beautiful, fragile. It took ages for Eggleston to get the recognition he deserved (or even commercial success).
“William Eggleston (born July 27, 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee) is an American photographer. He is widely credited with securing recognition for color photography as a legitimate artistic medium to display in art galleries.
Egglestons father was an engineer who had failed as a cotton farmer, and his mother was the daughter of a prominent local judge. As a boy, Eggleston was introverted; he enjoyed playing the piano, drawing, and working with electronics. From an early age, he was also drawn to visual media, and reportedly enjoyed buying postcards and cutting out pictures from magazines. As a child, Eggleston was also interested in audio technology.
Eggleston’s early photographic efforts were inspired by the work of Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, and by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’.
Eggleston began experimenting with color in 1965 and 1966; color transparency film became his dominant medium in the later sixties.
Eggleston’s development as a photographer seems to have taken place in relative isolation from other artists. In an interview, John Szarkowski of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) describes his first, 1969 encounter with the young Eggleston as being “absolutely out of the blue”. After reviewing Eggleston’s work (which he recalled as a suitcase full of “drugstore” color prints) Szarkowski prevailed upon the Photography Committee of MOMA to buy one of Eggleston’s photographs.
In 1970, Eggleston’s friend William Christenberry introduced him to Walter Hopps, director of Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery. Hopps later reported being “stunned” by Eggleston’s work: “I had never seen anything like it.”
Eggleston’s mature work is characterized by its ordinary subject-matter. As Eudora Welty noted in her introduction to The Democratic Forest, an Eggleston photograph might include “old tyres, Dr Pepper machines, discarded air-conditioners, vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-Cola bottles, torn posters, power poles and power wires, street barricades, one-way signs, detour signs, No Parking signs, parking meters and palm trees crowding the same curb.”
William Eggleston in the real world. 2005 documentary by Michael Almereyda
God Damn That’s A Good Looking Blue”: Winston Eggleston on William Eggleston, from 2008. Film and interview directed by: Douglas Sloan Courtesy.
The secret Paris of the 30′s was probably the first photo book that caught my interest. The images were mysterious and charismatic, everything was shot at night. Prostitutes, lovers, criminals and foggy landscapes, all in chapters accompanied by the photographer’s stories.
Back then I didn’t know if I wanted to be a writer, a photographer or a filmmaker, and seeing how Brassaï had managed to combine text and image really inspired me.
You can see more of Brassaï’s work on Flickr
Brassaï’s photographs are not manipulated, but even so, you can tell he worked alongside the Surrealists: The images/ scenes are a bit like found objects, and they often imply more than they show, leaving lots of room for interpretation. In fact he also did a series called Involuntary Sculptures which really are found objects photographed.
“And the external world is reborn upon his paper, natural and more than natural, beautiful and more than beautiful, strange and endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of its creator. The phantasmagoria has been distilled from nature.”
These words were written by Baudelaire in 1863 about Constantin Guys, The painter of modern life. Brassaï compared himself to Constantin Guys when he defined his vision and aesthetics as a photographer in the introduction to Camera in Paris (1949).
In the early 1860s Constantin Guys worked for The Illustrated London News. His drawings were turned into woodcuts and used for illustrating the latest from Paris; war, fashion, opera, etc.
The fact that Constantin Guys was an anonymous character allowed Baudelaire to create an ideal “painter of modern life” in his essay: a philosopher, a flaneur, a poet, a novelist, a moralist. Not an artist, but a reporter: “a genius with a pronounced literary element” who wanted to see and record all, and had an interest in the most trivial things, like a child: “the child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk.” A traveler, who’s most important qualities were curiosity and a love of life: “…the painter of the passing moment and of all the suggestions of eternity that it contains.”
“He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call ‘modernity’; for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the transitory”…“By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.
It’s interesting for a photographer to have Baudelaire’s modern painter as an ideal, since Baudelaire was no great fan of photography. Photography depicted the world realistically and truthfully, and thus attracted the public, who had a taste for truth that could not be combined with a love of beauty, Baudelaire wrote in The Modern Public and Photography: “…art is losing in self-respect, is prostrating itself before external reality, and the painter is becoming more and more inclined to paint, not what he dreams, but what he sees.”
“What is pure art according to the modern idea? It is creation of an evocative magic, containing at once the object and the subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself.” Baudelaire explains in the essay Philosophic Art. Modern Art was to seek the magic union of object and subject, the inner and outer world.
Here’s Brassaï and some other old masters coupled with Gershwin on YouTube:
“Brassaï (pseudonym of Gyula Halász) (9 September 1899 – 8 July 1984) was a Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker who rose to fame in France.
Gyula Halász was born in Brassó (Braşov), in Hungary, now Romania, to a Hungarian father and an Armenian mother. He is sometimes incorrectly described as Jewish. At age three, his family moved to live in Paris, France for a year, while his father, a Professor of Literature, taught at the Sorbonne. As a young man, Gyula Halász studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, before joining a cavalry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, where he served until the end of the First World War. In 1920 Halász went to Berlin, where he worked as a journalist and studied at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Academy of Fine Arts.
In 1924 he moved to Paris where he would live the rest of his life. In order to learn the French language, he began teaching himself by reading the works of Marcel Proust. Living amongst the huge gathering of artists in the Montparnasse Quarter, he took a job as a journalist. He soon became friends with Henry Miller, Léon-Paul Fargue, and the poet Jacques Prévert.
Gyula Halász’s job and his love of the city, whose streets he often wandered late at night, led to photography. He later wrote that photography allowed him to seize the Paris night and the beauty of the streets and gardens, in rain and mist. Using the name of his birthplace, Gyula Halász went by the pseudonym “Brassaï,” which means “from Brasso.” As Brassaï, he captured the essence of the city in his photographs, publishing his first book of photographs in 1933 titled “Paris de nuit” (“Paris by Night”). His efforts met with great success, resulting in his being called “the eye of Paris” in an essay by his friend Henry Miller. In addition to photos of the seedier side of Paris, he also provided scenes from the life of the city’s high society, its intellectuals, its ballet, and the grand operas. He photographed many of his great artist friends, including Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, plus many of the prominent writers of his time such as Jean Genet, Henri Michaux and others.”
