Photography by Christopher McLeod

2010-02-15T03:23:00.000-08:00

Scalpay: Last of the Fishermen

Photographs by Johan Hallberg-Campbell

Curated by Donald Weber

Johan Hallberg-Campbell has an intuitive empathy for the subjects of his documentary portraiture. In this his latest work, part stills part video, Johan travels home to Scotland and through his own feelings and knowledge explores the persistence of memory and the viability of collective mythology. The population of the Western Isles is diminishing year on year as more and more young people leave their island’s heritage.

The future is absent here, the past lingers in the frozen hands of the fishermen; trades and skills no longer passed down generation to generation. Johan shows us what is left the present; ruddy, calloused, worked hard alive. He describes the life on the water and on the island, the waiting and the erosion of this culture. This is a powerful ensemble of images beautifully accompanied by the Gaelic narration of Ruth Morrison.

at the Pikto Gallery 55 Mill St, The Distillery District, Toronto.

From March 23^rd – April 29^th 2010

http://www.vimeo.com/9300959

http://www.johanhallbergcampbell.com

2009-12-06T13:08:00.000-08:00

Colin Gray began to take photographs of his parents in the 1960s when he was 5 years old. At family occasions, holidays and celebrations Gray would be allowed one shot from the single roll of film in a square box brownie tin. Over the next three decades his series of photographs has accumulated into an extensive body of work documenting his parents loving, working, homemaking and playing.

'In Sickness and in Health' forms the final stages of 'The Parents' series. Begun in 2000, it shows his parents deterioration and ultimately his mothers' death.

The hospital and church visits became more frequent, the ailments more serious, the drugs regime ever more complex. Whilst his father struggled with his new role as a carer, Gray found that his photographs helped make sense of the deterioration and loss he was experiencing. Having reached the age that his parents were when he started the project, Gray now sees their history in his own future.

Born in Hull in 1956, Colin Gray studied at the Royal College of Art, London and lives and works in Glasgow. He has exhibited worldwide including shows at Kunsthal, Rotterdam; Encontros da Imagem, Braga, Portugal; House of Photography, Prague and the Australian Centre of Photography in Sydney. He has appeared in numerous publications including 'The Photograph as Contemporary Art'.

A minigraph with an essay by Sue Steward has been published by Street Level to accompany the exhibition.

His book 'In Sickness and in Health' published by Steidl Mack, will be available in December.

2009-12-06T12:46:00.001-08:00

Urgent, necessary, those eight films, as different as they may be, share a common aesthetics of confusion: they express the brutality sometimes needed to give birth to an image in some places and about some themes. But the worst thing is that those 8 films are wonderful - LIBERATION

2009-11-01T04:03:00.000-08:00

About Itchy Scratchy

“I think of it as the picture/s that you print up, just to a small working size, to get a look at. The ones that interest and trouble you because there is something that you don’t fully understand about them, as if you unconsciously did something. These pictures seem to signpost a new direction in a photographer’s practice, they are transitional pieces, and precursors to a new phase or project. I think all the best photographers have the guts to move beyond the pictures they already know they can make, and spend time with the itchy scratchy pictures to work out what comes next.”

Charlotte Cotton

Itchy Scratchy is an exhibition of photographs. The title is taken from this quote by Charlotte Cotton, where she describes the pictures which break photographers out of familiar ways of working. The exhibition affirms the role that happy accidents and epiphanies play in creative activity.

Itchy Scratchy was initiated by photographer/writer Jason Evans. All exhibitors have been invited to submit an itchy scratchy image to be reproduced on matt paper using an inkjet printer. The exhibition features a broad range of photographers, from the emerging to those of international repute.

Permanent Gallery 09

2009-10-31T13:25:00.001-07:00

photoworks 013

shameless self promo - page 44 (I know typo name check) still hope it makes sense....

Sakiko Nomura’s Night Flight published 2008, Little More. Akio Nagasawa Publishing.

2009-09-17T12:57:00.000-07:00

Untitled 2004/2006 © Sakiko Nomura

Nomura's work is a fresh tasting insight into contemporary Japanese photography. Check YAOHONG's blog for some juice or click on the link below;
http://chngyaohong.com/blog/contemporary/sakiko-nomura/
see Photoworks Autumn/Winter

2009-07-05T01:38:00.000-07:00

Famiglia Margini presenta:

RAZZISMI

In the best of traditions there's something very troubling about this project. The purpose of the venture is clear, its subject 'Racism' is an issue that foments the very best in reactionary art. Its curator Grace Zanotto explains it as a survey of the fear of diversity unassuming resolution but with a visceral display of what is the essence of terror in comparison. Though 'What's up with the image their using to advertise the show?' I hear you ask - The white tits and Somali babies. Is it a comment on the 'Madonna'?.. and reading the accompanying copy I was suprised to find that it's common in Italy to stereotype people as dwarves? Maybe something is lost in the translation? This will need to be a you tell me because I wont make it along.

If you are in the area:

Start Time:	Thursday, July 9, 2009 at 6:30pm
End Time:	Wednesday, September 16, 2009 at 6:30pm
Location:	Famiglia Margini
Street:	Via Simone d'orsenigo, 6
City/Town:	Milan, Italy

famigliamargini@gmail.com

Currents of Time

2009-05-25T09:10:00.000-07:00

Currents of Time:
New Work by Zineb Sedira
21 May - 25 July '09

www.iniva.org

This show is definitely worth a peep.
It's her third major film project since 2006 and if you missed; Saphir 2006 and MiddleSea 2008 this is clearly an opportunity to chek yo'self fool! ah ha! but don't take my word for it go see for your good self. A delight. She's as post documentary as you like.
It's curated by Iniva at Rivington Place EC2A 3BA

2009-03-21T08:20:00.000-07:00

tags as symptoms of preoccupation

2009-03-14T13:05:00.000-07:00

1832 6x6 about against angles arm backyard banff bar berber bicycle bike bordeaux bridge broadway broken by catch cbg chain circus coffee cold colonial colour commencal cool cross crosscountry decorative deep dmr dont driftwood eat event every exposure factory fake family fanny film fox fresh from fuji glasgow glass glove grave ground hallway healthy heston hotrod inch isleworth iso3200 it kick kitsch kodak lad lady law leg legs lighting lol lost love management market martin maxmax may metal montrose most motor mtb new newscotlandyard npz800 orange over pigs plastic point poor portraiture post protest pussy rags rain raleigh richmond ripped rockymountain rolleifex rollieflex rolliflex rug scowl sea secret shop silent singlespeed small smell smudge snail snow softplaces solutions spot ss stall steel storm story street surface sweet tessar thamesriver thesidepipe thinking toad toe unwanted vehicles vernacular wall want wanted was waterloo whats woking woodland xt yellow young your zeiss zen

Metaphor

2009-02-26T08:23:00.000-08:00

part Tom Hines interview by Julia Vangsnes in Dazed digital.

"DD: These days...when everyone has cameras on their cell phones... I wonder...what really makes a photo interesting, what makes a photographer?
TH: Aside from mystical traits, talents and other x-factors, one thing stands out: contextual ambition. I think about Jackson Pollock slinging paint around like a beast but having the wherewithal to declare his work Art in the proper context. There is a quote, probably false--I can't find it online--often attributed to Pollock as a way of describing his hubris. It goes something like, "there are only three artists: Picasso, Matisse and Pollock." The ego needs to be hyperbolic like that sometimes. That's probably what makes a photographer. I mean, I built the obligatory darkroom when I was kid, worked in it so long my skin literally fell off from chemical exposure, I learned about photography during this time. I wasn't a photographer, nor was I anything else. I was just curious and incautious. I went through all the motions. I've since come a long way. I've experimented with every medium I've wanted to experience, and I'm comfortable declaring myself a photographer in relation to other endeavours. It was the declaration that was missing before. And, yeah…maybe hubris, too. As to what makes a photo interesting, I can offer a metaphor. All my peers are creative professionals with nuanced perspectives. A group of us were hanging out the other night, talking about what's good. I found a metaphor that might describe our rarefied circle, a food metaphor. In food, sweetness represents caloric abundance. Everyone must like sweets, it's a biological imperative. In science experiments, rats are given sweetened water which they'll consume until their tongues are swollen. There is no imperative to consume bitterness. Bitterness represents poison to an animal. When I eat bitter greens and enjoy it, that's my intellect at work. Believe me; I don't need my intellect to enjoy sweetness, my body lights up in pleasure. I like to think of some photographs as being sweet chocolate bars and some as being bitter greens. Chocolate bar photos are extremely interesting, but one's intellect could be resistant to them. I know all too well, many of my peers will only declare respect for bitter greens photos. Still, both kinds are interesting, just in different ways."

http://dazeddigital.com/Photography/article/1488/1/Tom_Hines_Eye_of_a_Tiger

'Pornofoto - a cornucopia'

2009-02-26T07:50:00.000-08:00

Part 1
What should I write, I like porn? I use porn hmm that seems so simple, no purgatorial guilt not at all loaded with confessional catharsis? So far so good, now perhaps I can identify my project. I want to skim the surface of what we are consuming. I mean the pornographic imagery or at least I think I do. The trouble with talking about porn is that there never seems to be a good time for dialogue about it. With discourse perhaps narrower than other less taboo-stricken image genre perhaps a good starting point is whether or not I can discover the locus of current discourse? Hmm sounds reasonable If nothing the research will keep me busy. Interestingly the bulk of this study will be web-led, because nothing changes faster, so if I’m even going to get a handle on the thing I’ll be gleaning this as a primary resource.

Contextually this study will look at the currency of pornography in perhaps one of its most essential forms the still image, along the way I will identify the likely points of crossover between stills and moving image. Perhaps the goal of this project is as much an exploration, of a cultural phenomenon that continues to defy easy compartmentalisation, as it is an inquiry into the psychological schema of the image as porn.

The first thing you realise when you start writing about porn is that it’ll pretty much render most of your search engine enquiries incredulous. The very word causes, Results 1 - 10 of about 246,000,000 for porn (0.18 seconds), Google 2009-02-26. Now two hundred and forty six million results represents perhaps a subject better suited to a life’s endeavour but the thing of it is, that only represents pages cached with porn written in script somewhere. To take into account the true order and magnitude of the statistics you would need to add the results for images, Results 1 - 20 of about 6,080,000 (0.03 seconds).

That’s only from one search engine and maybe represents duplicated results I don’t have the stamina to back check these. It is often presented that porn statistically represents a majority stake in the total content available, James Stoner writing for the The Witherspoon Institute’s ‘Public Discourse’ - ‘estimates that as much as 35% of all content on the internet is pornographic’ J. Stoner ’09. This author believes that most if not all this type evidence is a misrepresentation. More often than not these types of statistics bear no real scrutiny. They are an unfortunate part of the freedom of the Internet. The truth is nobody actually knows, which is disappointing though not entirely unexpected.

I stated that the math above contained some statistical flaws, Imagine trying to write an algorithm that could calculate not only the total pay per view content but also the peer to peer material. ( difficult if not impossible to characterise). I believe the best point of departure in the face of such an impossible calculation is simply to assume the number is very large. Then logically the total number of consumers therefore is greater than the total content. With the world population currently estimated at 6.76 billion and even accounting for those who don’t have access to a computer it is my conceit that the number would be colossal. Even then you would still need to calculate the total hard copy of pornographic material including film, video etc That is not the purpose of this piece but serves as a guide to any notions of audience that I use herein.

· http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2009.02.09.002.pdart

Assistants Rights: GUIDELINES FOR WORK EXPERIENCE.

2009-02-23T06:04:00.000-08:00

Following some controversy regarding recent postings for work experience, please read these guidelines if you're willing to offer someone a work placement:

NOT OK:

You need someone to help you out on a shoot but you're not willing to pay them. If you're in need of assistance for a job and have expectations of the assistant's skills and performance, then you should be willing to reimburse them for their time. You are, in fact, legally obliged to pay the minimum wage.

OK:

You're willing to have someone along to shadow you and help out with things along the way. This should not be a replacement for an assistant, but should be something that, were they not there, would not be shoot-critical. You should have no demands regarding their skills other than general competency and trustworthiness. Please let us know if you are willing to offer someone a placement along these lines at admin@photoassist.co.uk with the subject "work placement offered" and we'll send your offer out to anyone who expresses an interest. Likewise, if you're interested in doing work experience, please drop us a line with "work experience sought" in the subject line.

Also, if you're a student or an assistant and are doing a test shoot for your folio and are willing to have another student or assistant along so that you both benefit from the experience, then feel free to post in the "testing" forum.

REGARDING WORKING FOR FREE:

If you're willing to work for free, then that's entirely up to you - it can be a good way to get experience in the industry. Please understand though that there is a big difference between you approaching someone to ask for experience (where you target people whose work you admire and where you think you might mutually benefit from helping them out occasionally), and us indiscriminately allowing adverts to be posted for people looking for free assistance. Although the majority of these are in good faith, it's too much of a grey area to police properly.

THANK YOU!

Originally Posted: 04 February 2009 at 11:45am
http://www.photoassist.co.uk/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=1402
by Duncan Soar

"disaster tourism"

2009-02-22T07:28:00.000-08:00

I'm gonna guess that its an extension of the voyeurism associated with travel photography. It's part of vernacular photography and is at the same time very specific. The same is obviously true for historical sites such as Belsen, Auschwitz etc In a way the places that are visited are culturally specific the photographs made on these visits are analogous with owning something emotively - guilt, remorse, horror, a sense of identity/ history.

The photographs that are made on theses trips are often interesting in that the usual compunction in vernacular photography is to pose a companion/ family member left or right of the subject, you've know doubt seen this done a thousand times and like me have probably participated in this act too. The purpose in this type of formality seems at first blush innocent; contextual, evidential or corroborative. Though thinking about vernacular images that I've seen made in circumstances such as the 1st Iraq war, and how these operate next to say the works of the artist Thomas Hirschhorn, the photographer Simon Norfolk and laterally to the works of Sophie Ristelheuber - always leaves me slightly perturbed. Each operates as its own narrative thread (each its own ontology), all exist within the canon of war photography but the negotiation between the vernacular stuff, the art based stuff and the photo -journalism stuff is problematic. Authorial direction is what seems immediately absent from the vernacular photography produced in this context.

Herein is the platform for tourism which comes loaded with the baggage (excuse the pun) of colonial photography. And lest we forget Roger Fenton's work in the Crimea and the works of Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner in the American Civil War. and the likelihood that a good deal of the work they made then was of suspect honesty. This macabre interest has always existed in photography. From Picture Post to coffee table tomes such as Joel Meyerowitz's - AFTERMATH. Devastation, death and disaster sell. I'm sure a clever editor may already be collating images for a book examining the yards of vernacular imagery created by the 'disaster tourist'.

Images as bodies of work, images as sequences and images as images.

2009-02-21T11:31:00.000-08:00

I have a coming sense that the tide is waxing. The inference that I'm drawing a circle around is the inevitability of photographs produced to co-join. These works attempt to describe a narrative or to support each other as sequential, perhaps as a tip of the hat to the genre? Are they simply exposures from a roll or choices from say a Flickr set (evidence of concoction or observation)? What have we here? It seems we have a pattern that can only best be explained by its correlation to what has long been admired in prose, poetry and other print mediums. We have the ubiquitous desire to collate or collect.

The purpose of images seems to have been mystified again. Historically the medium has been pulled here and there, its project seized by any number of applied photographers/visual artists in an attempt to pin photography down, to ground it in its essence. Photography is of course not much else but a means to make. It is not of the object to describe its purpose. Culturally it is neither one object nor another it’s a matrix of parts. It is perhaps this proximity to fluidity, any camera anybody, that makes photography so special.

The art historical motives for the almost counter intuitive procedure of making bodies or sequences of photos seems unclear. Typically you could assert that photography was in its project still mitigating its own technology. Imitation of say print editions, joining in the fallacy of limited print runs artist print, printers print etc though perhaps this goes deeper? Sociologically we arrange, in the arrangement there is order in the order there is value. Bodies and sequences archive well and speak of history and perpetuity. Though the project of photography is often described as a pursuit of the ephemeral, the fleeting or happen stance. How can two such contradictory positions be reconciled? In order to investigate this we need to realise our parameters.

The purpose of this piece is to work towards a better understanding, of the purpose of a photograph.

'Shoot photos of police – get arrested.' POLITICS IN REPRESENTATION.

2009-02-18T04:47:00.000-08:00

I know it was toothless.. Though nothing ventured nothing gained.
I attended;

I'm a Photographer ... not a Terrorist – Media Event - New Scotland Yard
The howls were more flashes and even so an uneasiness was upon Broadway. I fell by the way side. My infected red eye glowering at..at nothing really it was a fairly pleasant Monday morning, I had nothing to wince about. The act had become law, and theres a lot of disparity about that. Clearly it will affect journalists first they are the frontline. What is not immediately clear are the likely ramifications for all visual artists. Section76 is reasonably explicit in its project it seeks to curtail the possible use of stills/video of the U.K.'s state apparatus, military & constabulary by terrorists. There is an out - the out is based upon the definition of 'likely to be of use to terrorists'...... hmmm

Terrorist offences
76 Offences relating to information about members of armed forces etc
(1) After section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 (collection of information) insert—
“58A Eliciting, publishing or communicating information about members of armed forces etc
(1) A person commits an offence who—
(a) elicits or attempts to elicit information about an individual who is or has been—
(i) a member of Her Majesty’s forces,
(ii) a member of any of the intelligence services, or
(iii) a constable,
which is of a kind likely to be useful {Nice and vague legal definition, so theoretically anything related to the city of London though also any ex –mod staff or police} could be to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or
(b) publishes or communicates any such information. {The full legal implications would mean photographing any of the above list and uploading them to flickr for example – where they could be accessed by a third party possibly a terrorist}

58A.(2) It is a defence for a person charged with an offence under this section to prove that they had a reasonable excuse for their action. {This is the one clause that’s built in to allow you or I the opportunity to defend our actions in making a photograph, though if you need to use this it's probable that you are already under arrest}

I was peripheral, maybe I felt toothless amongst the valiant, their cannons (sic) hanging off them like guns for hire, old west, cops & robbers style. A hollow vacant yelp! as we slowly resign our rights to the state.

Contestation and power

2009-02-15T08:54:00.000-08:00

"The metaphors of ‘discursive space’ and ‘argumentative texture’ bring a number of points to our attention. First, we can note the emphasis on contestation. There is usually in social life a struggle over how things are to be understood and for that reason it makes sense to talk of a politics of representation. Second, power is at issue here. Social scientists who study discourse have been interested in how people, groups and institutions mobilize meanings. How have some interpretations become dominant and whose interests do they serve? It has been recognized that control over discourse is a vital source of power and also there are limits to this control because meanings are fluid and escape their users and can be mobilized and re-worked to resist domination."

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=211139

Monkey see, Monkey do.

2009-02-15T08:06:00.000-08:00

In order to stand out in order to perhaps increase our chances of survival in a career that’s notoriously perilous. Like gladdened fools we imitate, we posture then when this is not enough we innovate. The concepts of art and entrepreneurialism have always operated together but perhaps at no other time have these two ideas become so necessarily coupled.

2008-12-09T13:13:00.000-08:00

Edit.

Hirschhorn Response

2008-12-05T11:18:00.000-08:00

The installation* of the Thomas Hirschhorn’s ‘The Incommensurable Banner’ in the Fabrica Gallery (a former Holy Trinity Church) as part of the Brighton Photo Biennale is problematic on many levels. I’m left wondering how much consideration was given to how the piece operated within this space of presentation. In my opinion the title is depressingly wordy, and immediately bad foots the majority of its audience. Whenever was a protest banner less explicit in its statement?

Glancing at the table of assembled books (required reading or proof of process?) I began to feel that this shows remit was too broad and over-arching in its project. It seemed to me to be attempting to engage a multitude of discourses including protest, anti-religion, secularity, Islamophobia, free-dissemination ‘v’ propaganda and evidence, all approached with Hirschhorn’s palpable forensic distance and utilitarian handmade style.

The images represent a collection from those in current circulation, sources it seems are barely considered noteworthy, and though the Internet is obviously the primary resource there is no indication of the context from which the images have been pulled. There’s an unnerving sense of clinical slickness as the reader passes through the frosted security screen, past the necessary pantomime that alerts the viewer to the potential for ‘SHOCK’.

Most if not all the images are from comparatively recent conflicts. Though not made explicit, a general scanning indicates that the majority of the victims are not white, Western or European. This is important because the piece is proposed as being ‘created with reference to a tradition of protest’. The victims/parts of victims follow notions of the ‘other’ though in extremis. Then there are, for me, the absentees - absence of identity, location, motive, culpability or purpose.

Hirschhorn’s negation of narrative through collage literally allows only one reading – the representation of the murderous capacity of contemporary conventional weaponry. Where are the images of dead allied western troop types? Why the random inclusion of bystanders? Is the reader simply expected to accept these images irrefutably as proof? How authentic are these and what editorial process have these images undergone pre-collage? The whole is coalesced into a morass of random anonymity and yet T.H. chides us ‘that in respect to identifiers – if we need anymore info than what we’re presented with that we should some how be ashamed’ in his mind we’ve already begun to distance ourselves from the subject. This is a radical assumption and the timbre of T.H.’s assertion shows an un-subtle contempt for the audience/reader. The works ability to “implicate us in the realities of war waged on our behalf” seems an incredibly patronising and incommensurably European proposal, within the perceived maxim that ‘if your not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’.

The negotiation of the banner in its scale and aesthetic, offers the viewer nothing. It must be said that the form it takes in no way engages in its mimicry or lip service to the protest banner – It naturally fails to offer intimacy (too confusing, too poorly made and yet what a painful endeavour to treat so shoddily), It easily shakes off anything that would articulate it as in anyway sublime (the space is still more impressive than the work it houses). It perhaps speaks best of its direct relationship to an oversized used toilet roll that bears the pre-charnel evidence of the very worst of human incident. Every level of aesthetic care seems to have been abandoned, sacrificed I can only suppose, for the gravity of the piece overall.

The conceptualisation, the text that accompanies the piece seems ridiculously polemical, questionable statistical information strung together with a series of hackneyed quotes from seriously overused and disastrously prevalent sources. Quotes that hang like a litany proposed as scripture. The failure of this work though is not in its general misconception, not in its contempt for the subject or in T.H.’s assumptions about his audience no poignantly it fails in its efficacy as a project because they’re at best only copies of photographs. That’s all.

The proposal of this show - to generate discussion, and to operate as a necessarily uncomfortable juxtaposition for traditional war photography to be seen elsewhere in the Biennial - is perhaps achieved but at what cost?.

*(Here following I do not differentiate between choices, decisions made by Fabrica on behalf of Thomas Hirschhorn)

2008-12-05T08:10:00.000-08:00