Harvey Benge

Be BOLD With Bananas....

2009-07-10T09:50:00.005+12:00

When Gerry Badger and Martin Parr produced their amazing two volume edition, THE PHOTO BOOK, I firmly believe that they overlooked an important genre. That of the cook book. One of my favorite photo books is a little hard-back recipe book called BE BOLD WITH BANANAS produced in Wellington sometime in the sixties and printed not surprisingly by the Gothic Printing Company. Whoever made the pictures in the book, preempted Parr for seriously strange and for color saturation. And if Freud had been able to get his hands on a copy he would have had a field day.... here are four pictures.... eat your heart out....

Ruins of a Golden Age - the truth behind the pictures

2009-07-09T14:42:00.004+12:00

or... how the New York Times pulled the plug on altered photos....

Adam Gurno does not have any particular expertise in photography or digitally altering photos, other than the fact that he has several kids and occasionally uploads their pictures onto his computer. But when the Minnesota computer programmer was perusing through a photo slideshow at the New York Times’ website, one of the images caught his eye. Gurno has been a member of the Metafilter community since 2005, and yesterday during his lunch break he followed a link from there to the slideshow shot by Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins. The photographer had taken photographs around the United States of abandoned construction projects left unfinished because of the housing and securities market collapse.

“I was on a lunch break and I was paging through it, and I really liked it,” Gurno told me in a phone interview. “And then I was looking at the shot with just the framing, the half done house, a shot from the inside. And right at the top there was this tiny bit of wood, and it sort of set off a little internal alarm. We built our house a few years ago and I’ve seen houses being built, and I have a good idea of what a frame looks like … The angle on it seemed a bit unreal and it kind of made me say, ‘I don’t know, I think these are kind of fake.’ I kind of got the feeling it was. So I posted about it on Metafilter.”

Specifically, he wrote, “I call bullshit on this not being photoshopped,” a phrase he said he later regretted because it was so widely quoted. Gurno then went back to his day job work, but the entire episode continued to bother him, and he felt that he needed to provide more evidence. So he took the photo, split it right down the middle, and used Adobe to overlay the two halves together. Just as he suspected, the two shots were identical.

Essentially, the photographer had taken half a shot of the house and then mirrored it to make it look as if he had taken a shot of the entire frame. To try to cover up his work, he added in some features to try to mask the fact that both sides were basically the same.

“Then someone [on Metafilter] said, ‘hey, someone should send this to the New York Times,’ and I actually had that idea so I went to the New York Times and went to the contact page and emailed the public editor and I think the web editor,” he said. “I wrote something like, ‘I found this photo essay, and I looked at this picture and I think it’s been manipulated,’ and I think that’s all I said. I got the standard form response, saying, ‘thanks for contacting us, yada, yada, yada, we always read the stuff submitted.’ And then I went back to work, and in the evening I took care of my kids, had dinner with my wife, and went to bed. When I woke up I found that the New York Times had pulled it down, and a bunch of other sites started linking to it, and it sort of really blew up when I was gone.”

So what does this say about the web community’s ability to essentially act as a fact checker for mainstream media stories?

“When you do computer programing there’s an old maxim that to 10,000 eyes all bugs are shallow,” he replied. “It’s an open source thing. What it means is that if you have a lot of people looking at it they’ll find all the bugs in your program, and I think the same goes for this. If I wouldn’t have found it then someone else would have found it … and I think in this case I was the lucky one.”

Simon Owens at bloggasm.com put me onto this story.... thanks Simon

Small Anarchies From Home

2009-07-08T14:14:00.004+12:00

Here are four spreads from my new book work SMALL ANARCHIES FROM HOME. In a series of double-page spreads the 82 page book assembles images from the two places I call home. Strange details and things that often are not quite right. Those of you who know me will be able to identify the two cities where I made the pictures, those who don't will have to work it out. Anybody who can correctly name the two cities and emails me the names at harvey@harveybenge.com I will send a copy of the book as soon as it's available.

Ruins of a Golden Age

2009-07-04T08:09:00.005+12:00

The photographer Edgar Martins captured the physical evidence of the real estate bust in the United States. This is one picture from the series.

CHATEAUX ON CENTRAL
This project in downtown Phoenix was supposed to include nearly two dozen luxury homes, priced from $2.8 million to $4.5 million. But by early 2007, the city's high-end condominium market — which was among the country’s hottest — had become oversaturated. Prices started to fall, and Chateaux on Central’s developer, Central PHX Partners, declared bankruptcy.
A local commercial lender, Mortgages Ltd., stepped in that year with an offer to provide nearly $50 million in loans to help Central PHX complete construction. But the deal turned sour, and in March 2008, the developer sued Mortgages Ltd., claiming the lender had not made promised payments. On June 2, 2008, the C.E.O. of Mortgages Ltd., Scott Coles, committed suicide. At the time, one-third of his company’s loans were in default. More than a year later, Chateaux on Central remains unoccupied and unfinished.
Photo: Edgar Martins for The New York Times

Parrworld: The Collection of Martin Parr

2009-07-03T11:52:00.004+12:00

Parrworld: The Collection of Martin Parr
Jeu de Paume, Paris, 30 June - 27 September 2009
Curated by Thomas Weski.

Jeu de Paume is currently showing an exhibition dedicated to British photographer Martin Parr. "Parrworld" presents the both funny and satiric universe of this constant observer of the contemporary society. It gathers his latest photographs, as well as those from his own collection, but also many objects and curiosities he has been collecting throughout the world.

The objects
Among the themes evoked by these diverse objects, we find the age of the Soviet Sputniks, the reign of Maggie Thatcher, the pop group The Spice Girls and 9/11 – all events or phenomena that have entered the collective memory, largely because of their prominence in the media and association with strong visual imagery. Parr always chooses his everyday objects and curiosities for their ability to symbolise and crystallise the Zeitgeist. Their thematic organisation affords a new perspective on these items of very diverse origin. "I am also very attracted to objects which are ephemeral. Their significance and cultural context changes as the world moves on. Many of these objects are associated with people or events that are bound up with the glories of a certain time and place. When these glories fade, the object takes on a certain resonance, and that is the driving force behind the collections represented here."

Photography collections
Parr's favourite social themes are also reflected in the collection of photographs, presented here in British and international sections (approximately 80 and 25 photographs, respectively). The first part comes from what is the biggest private collection in England. Here, social documentary photography is found alongside works from the 1970s and 80s by Tony Ray-Jones, Chris Killip and Graham Smith. Artists such as Keith Arnatt, Mark Neville, Jem Southam and Tom Wood represent contemporary British photography. The international section features images that have influenced Parr or with which he feels a strong personal connection, ranging from photographs by masters such as Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston, to pictures by friends like John Gossage and Gilles Peress, as well as work by Japanese photographers, including Osamu Kanemura, Kohei Yoshiyuki and Rinko Kawauchi.

"Luxury"
2004 - 2008
"We are much too rich for our own good." In "Luxury," Martin Parr examines the phenomenon of wealth around the world, which he considers just as problematic as poverty.To make this new series, he travelled around the globe photographing fashion shows, art fairs, luxury markets and horse races in cities like Dubai, Durban and Moscow, but also took in event like the Oktoberfest in Munich. Modesty not being the most obvious quality of the jet set, who on the contrary love to flaunt their new and superficial wealth, Parr highlights the grotesque in order to produce an uncompromising study of this new international plutocracy, following on from the spirit of his earlier projects on the middle and working classes.

"The Guardian Cities Project"
2008
The daily newspaper The Guardian commissioned Martin Parr to do a report on ten UK towns: Belfast, Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. Each town was featured in a supplement distributed free with the newspaper, comprising a text by Parr evoking his memories and personal impressions, and colour photographs of the cities and their inhabitants. Jeu de Paume will present these double pages as well as prints of the photographs featured in the supplements.

Kodachrome - why it mattered

2009-07-02T13:30:00.002+12:00

The news last week that Eastman Kodak will no longer manufacture Kodachrome film should have surprised no one. The history of photography is in no small part the history of its technology. Equipment is constantly updated and thus constantly becoming obsolete. But while the discontinuance of Kodachrome may not be felt as keenly as that of other recently defunct items -- notably Polaroid's SX-70 film or Kodak's black-and-white printing papers -- the Kodak film has given honorable service for so long (since 1935 in movie cameras, since 1936 in 35mm still cameras) that its demise calls for a send-off more ceremonial than just a quote from the Paul Simon lyric.
All kinds of photographers at one time depended on color slides. During the second half of the 20th century, Kodachrome recorded countless American vacations, memories that in many households have slept undisturbed for years in their 2-by-2-inch cardboard sleeves. The film was also called upon for art-history lectures and elaborate advertisements, by travel and shelter magazines and, beginning in the early 1960s, by news weeklies.
Photo-realist painters and installation artists employed it as a humble tool. The shrewd exhibition "Slide Show," which premiered at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2005 -- six months after Kodak stopped making projectors -- brought together 19 works (and more than 2,500 slides) by artists as different as Nan Goldin, Dan Graham and Louise Lawler.
Even Ansel Adams, who distrusted color because in his day its reproduction on the page was so iffy, made hundreds of Kodachromes in various formats for commercial jobs during the '40s and '50s. A sample of this unrecognized work will soon appear in the volume "Ansel Adams in Color," to be published this fall by Little Brown.
Sports Illustrated was launched in 1954 as a weekly designed to exploit the emerging potential of color photography. A new celebratory volume published by the magazine, also named "Slide Show," is inadvertently a farewell valentine to Kodachrome. The picture book reproduces slides of famous moments, such as Lynn Swann's diving 1976 Super Bowl catch, caught by Heinz Kluetmeier's lens, complete with the notations added over the years by editors along the white border of the picture after they peered at it through similarly outmoded tools, the loupe and the light box.
Walter Iooss Jr., who began to work at the magazine in 1961, has mixed feelings about the end of the Kodachrome era. "It wasn't like you had a lot of options if you wanted to shoot in color," he recalls by phone from his house in Montauk, N.Y. For portraits and brightly lighted outdoor scenes, it was the go-to film, even though early versions were so slow (rated at ASA 10) that "if you got any frozen action, it was a miracle."
The saturation of hues was the selling point and "the grain was sensational. Hands down it was the best color film of the period, until the '80s when Fuji caught up."
Kodachrome was so complicated to develop that amateurs and professionals were on an equal footing in relying on labs to handle the film. No basement darkroom was up to the task. Kodak had the exclusive processing rights until 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled this monopolistic practice unlawful. Among some photographers, says Mr. Iooss, the expensive regimen involved gave the film a "near mystical" status. "There was only a few labs that processed it," he says. In recent years, that number had shrunk to only one.
Mr. Iooss is even willing to muster regret for a less-heralded aspect of Kodachrome -- its trim little canisters. With their tight rubber caps, he swears they were "the greatest devices for smuggling contraband of all time."
What he won't lament is "carrying film through airports" where fogging by X-ray machines had been known to ruin a week's work. Or "waiting three or four days for the film to come back." Or "guessing when it was expired." Once you took Kodachrome out of the box -- and photographers at Sports Illustrated would grab "bricks" of unexposed rolls before heading out on assignment -- you never knew when your unused film was out-of-date.
Art photography, too, is now largely digital. But the American street and landscape photographers, who in the '60s and '70s made color as respectable as black-and-white, often preferred color transparencies over color negative film. William Eggleston urged his friend William Christenberry to try Kodachrome in the early '70s.
"I liked the density of the color," says Mr. Christenberry from his home in Washington, D.C. "I like things to be real. Some people think Kodachrome color is surreal, but I never felt that way." A book of this body of work is scheduled to be published next year by Aperture.
Joel Meyerowitz, another leading member of that generation, began shooting with Kodachrome in 1962 and carried it in his bag until a few years ago. Over the phone from Cape Cod, he recalls walking around New York during his youth with the British photographer Tony Ray-Jones: "He and I would shoot with Kodachrome, almost every day, and get expedited service, overnight. Then we would project the pictures on the wall, two or three feet across, and analyze what we had done and what the film would do in certain kinds of light."
He and other Kodachrome die-hards rhapsodize about "the luminous skin tones" it could elicit. "If you got the exposure right, you got the most exquisite curve. It held the information in the shadows and the highlights."
Dye-transfer printing -- still the most vivid and long-lasting, not to mention costly, way to reproduce color on paper -- was easier with Kodachrome than with other films, in Mr. Meyerowitz's opinion. Its three color emulsion layers (with filter layers built in) and the complex "subtractive" process required to produce the image was ideal for dye-transfers. "It's as if the film gave back to the dye-transfer lab what was already embedded there," he says. He credits Kodachrome with "instructing me in what the medium was capable of."
Digital technology has transformed picture-making and much else about contemporary life. The pace of change shows no signs of slowing down. But photography, by preserving figments of the present for the future, is innately elegiac.
It shouldn't be too long before songs are written by young men and women concerned that another innovation is taking their JPEGs, TIFFs, GIFs and PNGs away, if they haven't already accidentally erased the files themselves.

By Richard Woodward, an arts writer living in New York.

Marks of Honor

2009-06-28T09:39:00.003+12:00

Here are some images of my Marks of Honor photo-book homage to William Eggleston. First shown in May at FOAM in Amsterdam, the exhibition opens July 17 at Kaune Sudendorf Gallery in Cologne.

Kodak to Kill Kodachrome

2009-06-23T22:40:00.001+12:00

The Eastman Kodak Company announced Monday it would retire Kodachrome, its oldest film stock, because of declining customer demand in a digital age.

It was the world’s first commercially successful color film, immortalized in Mr. Simon’s song in 1973: “They give us those nice bright colors. They give us the greens of summers. Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day. ... So, Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.”

It enjoyed its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, but in recent years sales have dropped to just a fraction of 1 percent of the company’s total sales of still-picture films.

“It really has become kind of an icon,” said Mary Jane Hellyar, the departing president of Kodak’s Film, Photofinishing and Entertainment Group.

The company, which is based in Rochester, now gets about 70 percent of its revenue from its digital business, but plans to stay in the film business “as far into the future as possible,” Ms. Hellyar said.

Kodak has seven new professional still films and several new motion picture films introduced in the last few years.

Kodachrome was favored by still and movie photographers for its rich but realistic tones, vibrant colors and durability.

It was the basis not only for countless family slide shows but also for world-renowned images, including Abraham Zapruder’s 8-millimeter reel of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.

The widely recognized portrait of an Afghan refugee girl that appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1985, taken by Steve McCurry, was shot on Kodachrome. At Kodak’s request, Mr. McCurry will shoot one of the last rolls of Kodachrome film and donate the images to the George Eastman House museum in Rochester, which honors the company’s founder.

Unlike any other color film, Kodachrome, introduced 74 years ago, is purely black and white when exposed. The three primary colors that mix to form the spectrum are added in three development steps rather than built into its layers. Because of the complexity, only Dwayne’s Photo, in Parsons, Kan., still processes Kodachrome film. The lab has agreed to continue through 2010, Kodak said.

On Beattie's book blog....

2009-06-15T14:39:00.006+12:00

YOU WON’T BE WITH ME TOMORROW
A new photo-book from Harvey Benge

Working between Auckland and Paris, photographer Harvey Benge’s photographic practice investigates the idea of parallel lives, when one thing is happening here, something else is happening over there. Laced with humour and irony Benge’s pictures remind us of just how strange the world is.
Benge’s German publisher Markus Schaden comments, "One of the few photographers today who does as much for the poetics as for the philosophy of photography."

With a passion for the photo-book Benge is firmly of the opinion that photography works best in book form where narratives and visual associations can be explored. Not surprisingly then, since the early 1990’s, with publishers in France, Britain and Germany, Benge has produced over fifteen photo-books.

His latest book YOU WON’T BE WITH ME TOMORROW is a self-published artist’s book under his own imprint FAQEDITIONS. The 64 page book has been published in a limited edition of only 100 copies, each numbered and signed. It has just been launched in conjunction with Benge’s current exhibition at Auckland’s Bath Street Gallery.

YOU WON’T BE WITH ME TOMORROW is an intensely personal book and a meditation on loss and the inevitability of change. Benge’s friend “S” a central figure in the book writes, “the whole book feels like solitude… like the peace you feel when you walk alone… beautiful peace but also lonely…mournful.”
And Michael Gifkins comments, “this book starts its life simply as a book of photos. It becomes much more than this, chiefly because of the author’s careful attention to the meaning of his own work. But then it becomes much more again than even he intends, and even as we read it, which is always the measure of art.”

YOU WON’T BE WITH ME TOMORROW is published by FAQEDITIONS
PO Box 47 373 Ponsonby, Auckland 1144, New Zealand.
ISBN 978-0-473-15146-1
Edition limited to 100 signed and numbered copies
(RRP NZ$80 incl.gst)

Available at Parsons Bookshop, Auckland, selected other bookshops
or enquire from the publisher: harvey@harveybenge.com

Bath Street show, TJ McNamara writes

2009-06-15T09:48:00.003+12:00

New Zealand Herald, June 13

Harvey Benge, whose work is at the Bath Street Gallery, is a photographer who goes about the world recording what his alert and trained eye sees. Usually his work is published in books but for the festival the gallery is showing a large frieze originally commissioned by Dunedin Art Gallery.

This spectacular work, which occupies one long wall, is made of 240 A3-sized digital prints with few repetitions. In his travels the artist has spotted many things often paradoxically juxtaposed. Bikes and rubbish, a luxurious swimming pool and mountains beyond, a single cloud in a blue sky, airports, an advertisement for a porn theatre, crowds at the Louvre, sex shops and soap. It shows the variety of the world from sleaze to domesticity and it is held together by bright tones of red as accents. One of the most attractive photographs is simply colourful plastic pegs on a lawn strewn with autumn leaves. Certainly the effect of this huge endeavour is greater than the sum of its parts. The show is accompanied by bigger photographs which seem much more conventional by comparison although each has a small, disturbing quirk. Sculptural plaster of Paris hands are rendered strange by the layer of dust on them and a tidy image of a blond woman viewed from behind is given a little spin in the oblique glimpse of a piercing through her lower lip.

Venice - The 53rd Biennale

2009-06-12T11:10:00.005+12:00

Michael Kimmelman writes in last Wednesday’s New York Times.

“Organized by Daniel Birnbaum, this 53rd version of the venerable Biennale is tidy, disciplined, cautious and unremarkable. If any show can be said to reflect a larger state of affairs in art now, this one suggests a somewhat dull, deflated contemporary art world, professionalized to a fault, in search of a fresh consensus. It has prompted the predictable cooing from wishful insiders, burbling vaguely about newfound introspection and gravity.

The Biennale’s ostensible theme is “making worlds.” Mr. Birnbaum has explained in a news release that this means “an exhibition driven by the aspiration to explore worlds around us as well as worlds ahead,” which hardly explains anything at all, of course.... Mr. Birnbaum has also said his show is “about possible new beginnings,” to which end he has included works by the Gutai group, Japanese avant-gardists from the 1950s and ’60s; Lygia Pape, the Brazilian artist who came to prominence around the same time; and Gordon Matta-Clark, the short-lived American iconoclast of the 1970s. The art crowd gladly talked them all up, as if they were news.

But the Biennale is meant to be a survey of new art, and while conscientious young artists now dutifully seem to raise all the right questions about urbanism, polyglot society and political activism, their answers look domesticated and already familiar. They look like other art-school-trained art, you might say, which is exactly what Pape and Matta-Clark and the Gutai group didn’t want their work to look like, never mind that the art market ultimately found a way to make a buck off what they did, as it does nearly everything, eventually."

Makes me feel just a little better about being stuck in Auckland in winter.....

Photography Sell-Out, Gus Fisher Gallery

2009-06-10T08:00:00.008+12:00

This is a reposting from photoforum's blog site, with text and pictures by John B Turner.... thanks John.

Photographs from last night’s ‘Photography Sell-Out’ at the Gus Fisher Gallery, Shortland Street, Auckland, at which an estimated crowd of around 400 lined up to purchase photographs by notable practitioners for $15 a print. The idea for this event, organised by Craig Hilton, was for 15 photographers each to provide a 15 prints for sale at bargain basement prices. In the end 17 invited photographers participated: Mark Adams, Edith Amituanai, Fiona Amundsen, Harvey Benge, Conor Clarke, John Collie, Jennifer French, Darren Glass, Sam Hartnett, Rebecca Hobbs, Jae Hoon Lee, Ian Macdonald, Fiona Pardington, Haruhiko Sameshima, Ann Shelton, Shigeru Takato, and Ans Westra. Some provided sets of the same image, while others, like Ans Westra, proffered 15 different images (proof sheets in her case). Harnett provided both a print and CD of work, while Shelton provided a dyptych (for $30).

A long queue formed down Shortland Street from the entrance to the gallery which opened at 6pm sharp to let in the expectant but patient crowd. The work was fully sold out in just over an hour, grossing just over $4,500, at what must be one of the most unusual events at this year’s Auckland Festival of Photography.

Bath Street Gallery BIG WORK

2009-06-08T08:49:00.002+12:00

Here is an installation picture of my BIG WORK at Bath Street Gallery, Auckland.

Still on the subject of sex.... it seems it still sells!

2009-06-06T10:56:00.003+12:00

Paris tonight! Pumpin' House Style and Topless! Ok?

What Michael said...

2009-06-04T08:04:00.004+12:00

Here is the transcript of what Michael Gifkins had to say at my exhibition opening and the launch of my new book YOU WON'T BE WITH ME TOMORROW at Bath Street Gallery last Tuesday night.

"The reason Harvey asked me to launch his new book tonight is not because I know anything about photography. What I know is what Harvey has told me so on that basis it would be like reading out Harvey’s own PR release.

There is a truism though, which says a picture is worth a thousand words. On that basis I estimate that all over Auckland tonight the equivalent of perhaps five new novels are being launched and as a literary agent I do know a small amount about books.

Incidentally, you may have noticed that Harvey has just written War and Peace on the gallery’s southern wall.

You might ask yourself, why does a photographer choose primarily to make books of his photos rather than simply place them on gallery walls?

This is not the same thing as a curatorial retrospective accompanied by a book. The kind of book that Harvey invites us to enjoy is an all-new, artist-made thing, which is to be read according to quite specific rules.

First, it has a title – this book is called You Won’t Be With Me Tomorrow. As with a novel, the title is not merely descriptive of content – it resonates with that content, tells us how to read it. Harvey told me at dinner on Sunday that the average man thinks of sex once every seven seconds. It may have been seven minutes, but I immediately thought, thank God that the corollary isn’t true – that a woman thinks of sex every seven seconds.

Then I thought that perhaps Harvey should get out more.

But he went on to say – about this book – that it deals with the next stage within relationships after that seven-second urgency has been lost. In other words, if this is not a sad book, then it is certainly a poignant one.

Books also impose a mode of reading. As an English speaker, the impulse is to “read” a book from start to finish – in other words, to discover the narrative that the images cumulatively suggest. In photographic terms, each double page spread plays one picture of against another. So the editing of the book becomes hugely important – especially when the photographer himself is the editor. Why this order, and not another? Why this juxtaposition of one photo with the one on the page opposite? A lot can be explained in the relatively simplistic terms of a photographic critique – resonances of colour/form/line. But then too there are resonances of ideas, and as the book progresses we cannot help but feel that the author – the photographer – has something to tell us.

What?

We notice the recurrence of pictures of three women whom a police investigation would establish as “persons of interest”. We might choose to call them beautiful. We might want to label them as “the woman in the photographer’s life” and I’m sure Harvey would confess to this. But why the sadness/the longing/the poignancy of these and other images? Why the sense of spiritual desolation? What is all this white noise from colour’s existential vacuum? Harvey the photographer has taken the photos and then Harvey the editor has arranged them to tell us something.

If this was all there was to it, it would not be quite enough. But I suggest it goes beyond Harvey’s own intention for his images – or at least beyond his conscious intention. Who is the man with the bandaged leg? It’s Harvey, of course. But Harvey doesn’t know about Philoctetes, who 2500 years ago was one of the many suitors of Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world. Philoctetes achieved an injury exactly the same as this and it smelled terribly when the bandages came off. And how does this photo relate to my favourite in the book – and on the wall – of the bandaged woman whose arm twists up her own back to show us her tattoo of an anchor? Who has injured whom? Does love have to be like nuclear war, always resulting in mutually assured destruction?

This book starts its life simply as a book of photos. It becomes much more than this, chiefly because of the author’s careful attention to the meaning of his own work. But then it also becomes much more again than even he intends, and even as we read it, which is always the measure of art."

Philoctetes and me

2009-06-03T17:19:00.010+12:00

In the absence of a publisher, literary agent and friend Michael Gifkins spoke with eloquence at Bath Street Gallery last night to launch my new photo-book YOU WON'T BE WITH ME TOMORROW.
Michael, as ever acutely observant, spoke of the similarity between the books photograph of my bandaged leg and this image of Greek hero Philoctetes, who in Greek mythology was bitten by a snake. I think Michael was trying to say that perhaps it wasn't an anchor chain I'd tripped over but was a snake. He might be right.

Michael's post-script comment to this post is not postable or printable!

Auckland - Photography Sell-Out

2009-06-03T12:31:00.002+12:00

Next Tuesday night June 9, it's photography sell-out time at the Gus Fisher gallery. A lot of photography for not much!

Editing - some thoughts

2009-06-02T16:39:00.006+12:00

I watched David Mamet's film Red Belt (2008) last night. Mamet is both a film writer and director whose work I like a lot. Remembering that I have a little book of his, On Directing Film, written in 1991, I re-read Mamet's thoughts about the folly of rushing into visual / pictorial solutions. His advice, before rushing into anything is to understand what the scene means (read picture in photo terms) and to understand the progression of the work. He quotes Hemmingway who said, "write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works". Mamet goes on to say that a work only gets better by learning to cut the ornamental, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains. Photo-book editors could think about this, I include myself here. Shoot the pictures, edit, make a sequence, take out all the good images and see if what remains works.

Auckland Public Library - The Photo Book

2009-05-30T13:16:00.003+12:00

At 2pm tomorrow, Sunday May 31st, at Auckland's Central Public Library I will be talking about the photo-book. Among other things, how the photo-book has become an important and lasting vehicle for the presentation of photographic series and how it has become a significant rival and alternative to the showing of photographs on the gallery wall. I will also be talking about and showing my new book YOU WON'T BE WITH ME TOMORROW. The picture here shows some of the photo-books I've made since my first in 1993.

Bath Street Gallery - BIG WORK

2009-05-30T07:24:00.003+12:00

And here is the BIG WORK which I will install at Bath Street. First show at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2002, it consists of 240, A3 prints hung together to make an installation 1.8 x 16.8 m.

Auckland, Bath Street Gallery - BIG WORK, small works

2009-05-30T07:14:00.008+12:00

Here are five of the small works that I will show at my Bath Street Gallery show which opens Tuesday of next week, June 2. The works, each in an edition of five measure 640 x 480 mm. They include images made in Auckland, Paris and Genoa together with two works made in Auckland from my "S" series. These works are all from my new book work YOU WON'T BE WITH ME TOMORROW, to be launched at Bath Street on Tuesday night. This artist book, under my own imprint FAQEDITIONS has been produced in a limited edition of 100 copies, each signed and numbered.

Paris - La Force de l'Art

2009-05-30T06:38:00.005+12:00

Last chance this weekend to see LA FORCE DE L'ART, La triennale de l'art en France, showing in the magnificent Grand Palais in Avenue Winston Churchill. If the art doesn't get you the building will. It was at the first Triennale in 2006 where I made a number of the portraits for my book I LOOK AT YOU, YOU LOOK AT ME. How time flies.....

Bill Jay dies on May 10th

2009-05-19T09:00:00.004+12:00

CURATOR, AUTHOR AND PHOTOGRAPHER
BILL JAY PASSES AWAY IN HIS SLEEP

"Everything about photography, everything I write about photography, everything I photograph has a feedback system which says: This is what it's like to be human."--Bill Jay in a 2007 interview by Darius Himes of the Photo District News.

Bill Jay passed away in his sleep in Costa Rica Sunday night, May 10th. As Tucson photography dealer Terry Etherton noted in an email to fellow AIPAD photography dealers, "For those of you who knew Bill, you understand what a huge loss this is to the photography world."

Bill Jay began his career in the U.K. His first article to appear in print was published in "Practical Photography" magazine, then the largest circulation monthly in Europe, when he was only 19 years old. It was the start of career writing about the photography medium that extended over more than 40 years.

He later became the first director of photography at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and was the first editor/director of "Creative Camera" magazine from 1968-1969. In 1970 he founded and edited a new London-based journal, "Album". It only survived for one year, 12 issues.

To pay the bill during this early period, he was also picture editor of a large circulation news/feature magazine and the European manager of an international picture agency. He left England in 1972 to come to the U.S.

After studying with Beaumont Newhall and Van Deren Coke at the University of New Mexico, he founded the program of photographic studies at Arizona State University, where he taught history and criticism classes for 25 years.

Bill Jay published over 400 articles and was the author of more than 20 books on the history and criticism of photography. Most of these books have been published with Chris Pichler of Nazraeli Press, a former student of Jay's. Some
of his recent titles include: Cyanide and Spirits: an inside-out view of early photography; Occam's razor: an outside-in view of contemporary photography; USA Photography Guide; Bernard Shaw: On Photography; Negative/Positive: a philosophy
of photography; 61 Pimlico; Sun in the Blood of the Cat; Men Like Me, etc.

Jay was also frequently asked to contribute essays to monographs by well-known photographers, such as Jerry Uelsmann, Bill Brandt, Michael Kenna and Bruce Barnbaum.

Until his retirement, Bill Jay was a frequent guest lecturer at symposia and conferences and at colleges and universities in England and Europe, as well as throughout the U.S.

His own photographs have been widely published and exhibited, including a solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His previous monograph, "Photographers Photographed", included a selection of the thousands of portraits
he has taken of prominent individuals of the medium of photography, a database of which is located at the Center of Creative Photography, which also houses his research archives.

The photograph is one I made of Martin Parr and Bill Jay at the Wellington Photography Festival

Paris May 1st

2009-05-01T18:08:00.002+12:00

Spring day in Paris today..... how pleasant to be in the gardens at Palais-Royal

Photography Sell-Out

2009-04-30T09:02:00.007+12:00

At Auckland's Gus Fisher Gallery on Tuesday June 9 from 6 to 8pm seventeen photographers will each present an edition of 15, each work to be sold for $15. Part piss-take, part conceptual and creative challenge the event has already raised the hackles of some in the "art business" who feel that the whole affair is indeed a sell-out. I'm sure it will be!
Photographers include Mark Adams, John Lyall, Ian Macdonald, Fiona Partington, Haru Sameshima, Ann Shelton and Ans Westra.
My work is called $15 Scream, After Baldessari (and with thanks to Edvard Munch).