It's Halloween

Moving house...

Unfortunately, I had to move house this weekend… Would have loved to postpone this until I have finished my studies in December… but the landlord had different ideas… Fortunately for me, help was at hand in the form of my mother and brother coming over from Germany with a van… So, yesterday we packed my stuff and the three of us made our way to the Black Forest – a 14-hour drive, including the ferry at Dover/Calais…

In a few days’ I’ll be returning to London to finish off my studies… If I can find a short term place to stay…

Magnum workshop

This weekend I had a chance to attend a workshop run by three distinguished Magnum photographers: Martin Parr, David Hurn and Mark Power at the London Magnum offices. (They called it a Magnum ‘Masterclass’ but that term to me implies that the 24 participants (including me) were selected on the basis of our photographic work, but it was more mundane than that - everybody who could cough up £300 could participate – so I’d prefer the term ‘workshop’).



This was a highly instructive and entertaining weekend with these photographers. Each of the photographers presented their impressive body of work and also did portfolio reviews with each of the participants… So it was interesting for me to get some feedback and perspective from Parr and Power on my recent work on the underpasses…





And obviously there have been a few bonmots during the weekend… Here are some of the sound bites during the presentations and in conversations during the lunch and tea break…

Hurn on being with Magnum: “…the great thing about being with Magnum is that you always have someone next to you who is better than you are... which in incredibly valuable for your own progression…”

Hurn on being a photographer: “… Fifty-two years of having fun while trying to avoid dying of malnutrition…”

Hurn on working as a freelancer: “…those days I was working as a freelancer… which really meant I did not know what I was doing…”

Parr on photographers: “…we photographers are all a bunch of sobby leftist nostalgists who love to photograph nostalgia… I am more interested in photographing things that are in rude health… things that represent the zeitgeist…”

Parr on his obsession for collecting things: “…I have the largest Saddam Hussein watches collection… and I am an e-bay junkie… so if you ever bid on e-bay on Saddam Hussein watches and you see ‘bookjunkie’ bidding against you, that is me…”

Parr on England: “… I am the quintessential British photographer… but also have this love – hate relationship with England… so taking pictures about England is a form of therapy for me…”

Power: “… if it wasn’t for the £200 that this picture editor gave me of his own money, which allowed me to continue with my photography, I would not be sitting here and presenting my photographs but making very bad furniture…”

Power: “…I started as a painter in art school but then I went to a Don McCullin exhibition which totally moved me… in a way a Rothko painting could never move me… so I decided that I wanted to be a photographer… I even sent Don McCullin a letter and he even – surprisingly – replied, saying that the third world did not need another photographer and that I should look for a different subject to photograph…”.

Heathcliff O'Malley at the Frontline Club

I went to a slideshow presentation of the British photographer Heathcliff O'Malley at the Frontline Club tonight. He covered, inter alia, just after 9/11, the prequel and the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. I thought that his best images were the images he took before the wars began and shortly after the US led coalition occupied Kabul and Baghdad. What struck me most – and of course this is with a great dose of the benefit of hindsight and the knowledge we have now – that one could already see subtle signs in his images that both wars would soon run into difficulties and end up in a big mess. He had a few very telling images that showed the relationships between civilians and the US army that suggested that the relationship would end up as a troubled one…

Putting the story together...

In about a month’s time, we have to hand in our final project – in whatever form we think is appropriate for our projects (most of us will either choose the form of a book, exhibition or multimedia piece). And with this deadline fast approaching, I guess it becomes clear to us (a fact we knew all along!) that photography is as much about taking pictures as it is about finding the right form to present the images, and, once found: it is about execution! I wrote in an earlier blog that I had found the appropriate form for my project (a multimedia slideshow) relatively early on in the final term. However, this is where the hard work starts, or to be precise: this is where a number of important design and editing choices are made. What is more, my hunch is that eventually this will determine to a large part whether a project is merely a solid piece that gets polite applause on December 3rd (the opening night of our final degree show) or whether a project really taps its full potential.

Since none of us is a book designer, curator or multimedia artist… we dabble along in these disciplines… (we still get help from industry specialists who come to the college and teach the basics). Unfortunately, none of us is in a position to assemble a team of book designers, multimedia specialists or printers around us to execute our ideas on how to present our project (Steidl Ville and the multimedia design factory of Magnum in Motion are far away and out of reach). And yet we have the ambition to create a first rate piece that can compete with the state of the art of what is out there and a piece that we can be proud of when we stand there on December 3rd and people (and our friends) are visiting the degree show…

The recent three part blog entry on the Magnum website gives an interesting insight into how a multimedia piece by Alex Majoli came into being. The last part dwells on the technical difficulties and obstacles that the multimedia specialists had to overcome to bring about the Alex Majoli piece. Somewhat comforting that the experts are struggling with similar problems (e.g. bandwidth versus quality) that I am dealing with and over which I am pulling my hair out…

Paige's All American Birthday Party

A few images from Paige's birthday party last night at Kevin's house...

(I can't claim authorship of all images shown here as Paige and Jon have also picked up my camera.)

The art of editing… and the challenging last mile

Magnum photographer David Hurn says in the book “On Being a Photographer: “… the best editors/selectors of images are those who are capable of divorcing themselves from emotion when judging their own (or others’) work and assessing picture merit dispassionately and with cold logic… Some photographers of the highest rank are capable of this detachment; most are not…” (p.142, On Being a Photographer by Bill Jay and David Hurn, LensWork Publishing, 2004).

His comments ring very true as I am editing and re-editing my work on Kiev’s underpasses… I find it incredibly difficult this time to make choices about which images to include and sequencing them in a way so that a coherent story emerges. Or to be precise, I find it difficult to make the final selection, to finish the last mile (it was relatively easy to cut down from 500 to say 100 images).

I made huge progress and leaped a few decisive steps forward yesterday in a tutorial with Paul who applied the ‘dispassionate and cold logic’ that Hurn was talking about and set me off in the right direction.

But why is it this time more difficult for me to edit my own work? It felt much easier in the “Gay Dads story” I did earlier in the year. The sequence and the choice of images almost emerged naturally. So what is different this time?

I guess one main difference is that the “Gay Dads story” had a clear linear narrative. There was a given sequence of events: ‘before the birth – birth – daily life after’ which dictated almost the way to tell the story. This time, with the underpasses story it is different. The storyline on the underpasses is a non-linear one. There are various ways to tell the story, so one (i.e. ultimately I) must make sometimes difficult choices on which way to advance the story, which slant to give the story: is it a melancholic one? A more upbeat one? Or both at the same time?

And there is another germane difference between these two stories, I discovered in an interesting conversation with a classmate recently. There is a difference in approach as well. Whereas in a linear/photojournalistic story such as the “Gay Dads story”, one “simply” follows the events. One has no control over events as such. There are choices of what to photograph and what to leave out but essentially the photographer tries to be present as much as possible and capture as much as possible. But there is generally no control over the sequence of events (a similar thing would be covering a war or a riot). The sequence of events (and often the outcome) is usually dictated by others (as in a war) or by life itself (the birth just happens).

In a more documentary, often non-linear, story such as the underpasses story, there is simply daily life, almost a series of “non-events” happening in front of your extended eye. There is no particular beginning or ending to it and you choose where to dig in with your camera, when to start and leave and what to focus on. The photographer in a sense creates the story which would fundamentally not be there wasn’t there an individual with an urge to tell it (I imagine, for example, Alec Soth lived through a similar experience when photographing his story on the Mississippi or Niagara).

And coming back to my initial point about editing: I am assuming that this is the reason (or rather one of the reasons) why it is more difficult to edit my underpasses story than the previous stories I have done.

Well, better get on with it and start drawing another storyboard…

Stefan George poem V

Today is a somewhat particular day... so I better let Stefan George speak in a poem...

Dem bist du kind, dem freund.
Ich seh in dir den Gott
Den schauernd ich erkannt
Dem meine andacht gilt.

Du kamst am lezten tag
Da ich von harren siech
Da ich des betens müd
Mich in die nacht verlor:

Du an dem strahl mir kund
Der durch mein dunkel floß,
Am tritte der die saat
Sogleich erblühen ließ.

(Stefan George 1868 – 1933)

Louise Bourgeois and other editing distractions...

After having spent almost the whole weekend editing and re-editing my work, going back and forward between images and sound quite a few times, it is time to leave the current edit sitting there for a while and go out and put my mind to other things… But before I put pen to paper on that I have to dwell a bit on the editing process… Gosh, the last mile is so painful… I have now drafted a detailed storyboard with timings of the sound and which images should go where, choosing anchor images for each soundscape… but still a few pertinent choices to make… There are still two categories of choices: I have a few images that are quite similar, so I have to kill a few of them, and then there is the choice of sequence… It sounds trivial but it feels pretty daunting when it concerns work that is important to you… David Alan Harvey has written an interesting blog entry on the editing process. He still uses small prints for important edits, stressing the tactile nature of the editing process for him… He writes: ‘…be instinctive, be yourself....make small prints of your work and carry them around with you...spread them around...play with the sequence....tack them on a wall...play with the sequence...this is very difficult to do on a computer screen regardless of the program...be tactile with your work...touching your photographs makes a difference...’ (Source: David Alan Harvey blog entry as of 26 September 2007).

But what better way to leave the editing process behind for a while and go out and look at the work of other artists… So I went to the much-acclaimed Louise Bourgeois retrospective at the Tate Modern (ignoring the stupid cracks on the floor in the main turbine hall, c.f. Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth exhibition there – well come to think of it, the cracks make nice backgrounds when you play around with a Holga – but more of that in a later post)… and I have to say, the Bourgeois exhibition is brilliant… Bourgeois’ work is rich and diverse, spanning a career of almost 75 years (she is now at 95 bound to her workshop apartment but still works as an artist, having commenced studying art in 1933 in Paris)… she worked with different materials on different subjects, often experimenting with materials that other artists would then come to use as well… Her main subjects explored her own childhood, the infidelity of her father and sexual ambiguity…

There was an interesting innuendo in the audio piece that came with the exhibition… Apparently, Bourgeois still holds court every Sunday at her New York apartment, inviting young and aspiring artists who talk about their work and get into a kind of conversation with Bourgeois… The audio piece suggests that depending on how the conversation goes, Bourgeois can be quite nasty or incredibly helpful… I would love to play fly on the wall at one of these Sundays…

Of man, monkey… and the value of a good tutorial

Caption: Man is bringing a monkey to a fast food restaurant in Kiev’s Maidan underpass…

(Why the hell is this man bringing his monkey to the restaurant? :-)

When I set out to photograph my major project in Kiev, I was determined to create a multimedia piece out of it… Apart from the visual impressions, the sounds and the music of the underpasses were just too ubiquitous and too important to ignore… As you know I did a fair amount of recordings of the sounds of the underpasses (see my blog entries ‘Sound of the Underpasses Vol. 1 and 2’) during my stay in Kiev.

When I came back and started to edit my work further, I commenced to have second thoughts… The idea of creating a book out of it began to become more and more alluring… Especially since I have asked a few native speakers (including my Russian teacher) to translate some of the song texts that I have recorded… So the idea of positioning lyrics and images started to take shape in my mind (and in prototype form on my computer using InDesign)… I became infatuated with the possibility to create something more tangible and less ephemeral than a multimedia piece. I also like the tactile quality of a book and the more permanent character, allowing the viewer to go through the book at her/his own pace, with the added possibility to go back and forward at one’s own whims… A multimedia piece is far more prescriptive and imposes a strict sequence on the viewer… and how many viewers will have the patience to sit through a 6 – 7 minute piece?

So yesterday I had my first tutorial with Brigitte Lardinois at college to go through my edit and questions such as book versus multimedia piece… When I played some of the sounds to Brigitte, she was very clear that a multimedia piece would be much more powerful in my case. The images and the sounds just belong together; they almost form a certain unity. It would also be a waste not to use the sound recordings I have made (and have in rather good quality).

When I saw that Brigitte was leaning back, closing her eyes and absorbing the sounds, I knew she was right… That is the value of a good tutorial with an experienced hand…

This has brought about the decision to create a multimedia piece… but now the hard work starts… I reckon it’ll be quite a number of iterations to marry the sound with the images… I expect numerous edits and re-edits of both sound and images… Better get started… Incidentally, there has just come out an interesting piece on the Magnum Blog on the subject of sound and image and how Magnum In Motion goes about creating multimedia pieces…

Return to College...

Caption: Remains of a very special Swedish apple cake from a very special person…
[Sounds like a bloody Tracy Emin caption :-)]

Today I returned to college for the first time after the summer recess… Time to catch up with some administrative stuff and above all meet some of my fellow students again… The day at college concluded with a fascinating and thought provoking research seminar by Julian Stallabrass on the ‘Meaning of Photography in the Vietnam War’. Stallabrass lectures in modern and contemporary art, including political aspects of the globalised contemporary art world, postwar British art, the history of photography and new media art at the Courtauld Institute of Art. The content of the lecture was rich in content, thoughts and conclusions… far too rich to summarise here or to attempt to recite parts of it… it would not do justice to this lecture…

However, I would like to focus on one question or rather assertion that Simon Norfolk made at the end… One of the themes of Stallabrass’ lecture was the power of the media in selecting which images to show to a greater public and how this also changed over the course of the war… and how eventually the media also contributed to the end of the war (and the defeat of the US) in the selection of images and reports from Vietnam… Norfolk suggested that – given that the (selective) power of the media has rather increased nowadays – think of the Iraq war – photographers are forced to preserve meaning in their imagery by moving towards the art end of the spectrum…

Norfolk suggested that it was easier to encode messages in more artful images that get exhibited in galleries and museums, leaving also more control with the photographer over the images that get presented… Albeit – according to Norfolk - photographers will then be lambasted for ‘artifying’ and ‘trivialize’ war and atrocities… An interesting thought from someone who should know… especially given Norfolk’s excellent standing, one would think that he has got more control over his images that get published in magazines…

Control by Anton Corbijn

I went to see the movie 'Control' by Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn tonight. I have long admired him for his iconic and unique images of music groups such as U2, Depeche Mode and others... but I have to say that he is also a brilliant director of movies. The movie 'Control' tells the story of the short life of the post punk group Joy Division which came to an abrupt end with the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis in 1980. The movie is filmed in black and white in a documentary style, albeit with 'real' actors... In some images and sequences you can just see the photographer in Corbijn coming through... Really worth watching!

Back in London...

Back in London after more than three months… a good opportunity to catch up on the latest exhibitions, movies and theatre plays… First I went to the Lee Miller retrospective at the Victoria and Albert museum… Lee Miller had a somewhat unique career: she was a model and a photographer, a successful fashion photographer (mainly for Vogue) and a serious photojournalist, particularly during World War II and the immediate aftermath. One of her most iconic images is showing her taking a bath in Hitler’s bathtub in his private apartment in Munich… she took this image to show the apparent banality of this monster’s daily life…



Photograph by Lee Miller.

Lee Miller was also close to (and often also a muse for) some of the most renowned photographers, painters, and writers at that time such as Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Picasso, Dali, André Breton among others… She died after an extraordinary life aged 70 almost exactly 30 years ago…

Turning to more contemporary photography: the Photographers’ Gallery is currently showing the project “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” by Taryn Simon where she photographed with a large format camera (5 x 4) over a period of four years odd places and things that usually are inaccessible or unknown to the general public. Among them an avian quarantine facility, the Playboy as a braille edition, a facility for inbreeding of white tigers, a research marijuana facility, the CIA headquarters, a nuclear waste encapsulation and storage facility, and a cryopreservation unit. While the images are at first apparently trivial or puzzling, the large format images really grow on you when you study them for a little longer and when you start to understand the context… A seemingly innocuous flask becomes eerily moving when you learn that it contains the HI virus… Unfortunately the talk with her this evening at the gallery was fully booked, I would have loved to listen to her speaking about her work… but in any case a very impressive body of work.



Photograph by Taryn Simon.

Stefan George poem IV

Komm in den totgesagten park und schau:
Der schimmer ferner lächelnder gestade
Der reinen wolken unverhofftes blau
Erhellt die weiher und die bunten pfade.
Dort nimm das tiefe gelb - das weiche grau
Von birken und von buchs - der wind ist lau
Die späten rosen welkten noch nicht ganz
Erlese küsse sie und flicht den kranz
Vergiss auch diese letzten astern nicht
Den purpur um die ranken wilder reben
Und auch was übrig blieb von grünem leben
Verwinde leicht im herbstlichen gesicht.

(Stefan George, 1868 – 1933)

Sound of Underpasses Volume 2

Due to popular demand, here is volume two of the sounds of the underpasses…

The Return of the Queen of the Orange Revolution?

According to the exit polls (the official results will be published in a few hours), Yulia Tymoshenko might well be staging a comeback as Prime Minister of the Ukraine…

Wrapping up...

This is what happens in my ‘biotope’ on election day, on Sunday morning… Builders are putting up new stalls for the flowers sellers and other traders… It is almost as if someone wanted to give me a signal to wrap up and finalise my project :-)







On a more serious note, this biotope has seen a lot of changes in the last two years since I have started to photograph these underpasses and the pace of change has accelerated in the last three months when I spent more time down there… The underpasses they way I photographed them over the last two years and more intensely during this summer have all but disappeared… And no other underpass than that at Maidan, the central place in Kiev, has epitomised this change: some of the social life (esp. musicians, socialising, drinking, etc.) that took place in the underpass at Maidan has shifted to other places, some of the older traders who sold cigarettes, flowers and other everyday articles have been crowded out by flashier new stalls that now sell jewellery, mobile phones and DVDs (there is simply no physical space for them anymore: where they used to sit are now the white stalls; the same applies for the musicians, there is hardly any space for them anymore as the walls are gone), and the green walls have been ‘adorned’ with illuminated advertising or blocked up with stalls that can be locked… In a sense that vindicates my documentary project even more…





But don’t get me wrong I am not deploring this change… I am just observing. It would be awfully patronising of me to deny these people cleaner and brighter underpasses with new stores for the sake of a visually stronger environment for a hedonistic photographer… There is just a bit of melancholy creeping in on my part, as I’ll be leaving Kiev tomorrow, a town where I have spent a good part of my summer this year, a city where I made some friends and a city I fell in love with… Here is a thought: maybe I should base myself in Kiev for a few months next year to pursue other photographic projects…