Junk for Code

American photography: Mitch Epstein

After five years of photographing the manifestations of energy production and consumption across the United States Mitch Epstein has been photographing trees around New York City using an 8-by-10 field camera and black-and-white sheet film.

Mitch Epstein, American Elm, Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn 2012, Gelatin silver print, selenium toned

The resulting photographs invert people’s usual view of their city: trees no longer function as background or landscape, but, instead, become the focus of the image, dominating the human life and architecture around them. He refers to the pitfalls of the picturesque by which he means that he didn’t want the color to be a distraction to what was intrinsic to the picture:

I realized there was a lot about the contemporary urban landscape that was colored that was going to become a distraction. Whether it was the yellow streetlights, the cross lights at the intersections, or the color of the red fire hydrant. There was also the potential to fall prey to the sameness of the color, especially in the summer season, when yes, there are varieties of green but the green is what is prevailing. Somehow black and white doesn’t prevail as a palette the same way color does.

He says that before bringing the 8-by-10 camera, I photographed the tree several times with a little digital camera. I spent time with the tree. It was January, and I first had to educate myself as to when the light would be at a favorable vantage point in the sky.

Mitch Epstein, White Oak, Raoul Wallenberg Forest, Bronx 2011, Gelatin silver print, selenium toned

In this interview Epstein says of the tree project:

With the tree pictures, there is a clear inversion of roles. In American Power, trees support — as a foil or counterpoint – the built environment, which is center stage, whereas in this current work, the architecture, environs and people recede into the background; the trees take center stage.

Though he shot in black and white to keep the viewer’s focus on the trees more than the surrounding human world (color can distract) he wanted to photograph these trees in the context of the contemporary landscape. The aim was to draw a broad portrait of the city through some of its extraordinary and idiosyncratic trees.

He adds that photography can capitalize on bring together what might initially seem like unrelated events or elements and link them in a way that can find new meaning through their juxtaposition. That’s part of what photography has the ability to do well.

Auckland Festival of Photography: Neil Pardington

Neil Pardington, who will exhibit a series on scientific collections in museums at the Auckland Festival of Photography, has a brief series on meat abattoirs.

I would have thought that this was one of those inaccessible and ‘forbidden’ spaces:

Neil Pardington, Abattoir #2, Digital Print, from the series The Abattoir

Since Pardington photographed only on Sundays so the abattoir is devoid of people, carcasses and movement. The above image is of the place of electrocution-- it shows a form of mechanized death. A stainless steel environment that is part of f working in a series – the idea of returning to a similar subject over and over again.

Pardington is both a film maker and photographer.

In 1986 Pardington began working with a large format camera (4x5) completing the series Local Anxieties, which documented buildings in Whanganui, a city affected by recession. He returned to large format photography in 2003 to photograph in the world of hospitals and medical museums for The Clinic series.

His latter project was The Vault, in which he photographed museum and art gallery storerooms. He highlighted thee strange and sometimes surprising collections of objects amassed behind the closed doors of New Zealand’s museums and art galleries; bizarre places stocked with piles of archival films, stuffed deer, Victorian portraits, mannequins in disrepair and assiduously preserved taonga.

revisiting Surrealism

Whilst reviewing the “Drawing Surrealism” exhibition in the New York Book Review of Books Sanford Schwartz observes that:

Surrealism has entered the language as a synonym for almost anything that seems odd, uncanny, or freaky. For some, the very word connotes a profane, or carnivalesque, lifting of the lid on hidden, even repressed, thoughts and feelings. But initially this art was romantic and revolutionary in its goals. A little like Dada, which was more a spirit in the air than a movement, and probably put as much energy into cabaret performances and the issuing of statements as the making of artworks, Surrealism was about the need for radically new approaches to writing, art, and experience itself.

Surrealism, which was underway in the early 1920s in Paris, came out of the same disgust with the attitudes that resulted in the1914-1918 war. sought to find, foster, and celebrate precisely the impulses that traditional or generally accepted thinking seemingly said had no place at the table.

Schwartz adds that surrealism remained a functioning movement of sorts until perhaps the early 1960s. It's last real impact on art probably came in the 1940s, when a number of American artists then finding their voices, including Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, were stimulated by Surrealism’s belief that the unconscious was a reservoir of energies waiting to be tapped.

Richard Barnes: rephotographing the past

Richard Barnes, the American photogrpaher, uses the wet plate collodion technology to rephotograph the American Civil War: photographing the re-enactment: people in costume recreating the battle with the use of support vehicles and loudspeakers for the benefit of spectators.

Richard Barnes, Cavalry cede the field to a truck hauling away cannon after a reenactment of the crucial Union victory at the 1864 Battle of Cedar Creek, Virginia. ' 2012.

Does this enable the viewer to look at the world as the early photographers must have seen it? Gettysburg reenactment.' It does make us think about the ways in which we think about and depict the past. Is it also a revisioning the past?

Museums do this all the time and we take their form of depicting the past in exhibitions, artifacts, arranged glass cases, taxidermy and dioramas as normal.

There is a turn back to the 19th century processes---here and here in Australia for instance--- which appear to be associated with the craft of creating hand made photographs than a revisioning Australian history.

finding futureland

Futureland was an influential exhibition of photographs in Thatcherite England of the 1980s that critiqued the landscape of post-industrial decline in the North East of England and post-industrial impact on landscapes and psychologies. Futureland reminds us that the picturesque isn’t enough, and that any landscape is about so much more than beauty, escapism, and wilderness or indeed decline, neglect or re-appropriation.

John Kippin Hidden, from Futureland

The photographs John Kippin and Chris Wainwright represented the social and economic upheaval in the north of England during the 1980s and referred back to the language of the sublime--the post industrial sublime. Many of the traditional industries particularly in the North of England, disappeared in a relatively short space of time with a significant move towards new economic initiatives in the information and service industries.

John Kippin and Chris Wainwright are an early example of how photographers are responding to the dramatic restructuring of Western economies in the past three decades.

Spectacular City – Photographing the Future

In 2006 The National Architecture Institute, Rotterdam held an exhibition entitled Spectacular City – Photographing the Future, which presented the work of some 30 leading photographers of the urban landscape. It was the first international survey exhibition of this work and it represents the best examples of urban photography from the last ten years.

It was an international group with a particularly strong Dutch representation. The photographers included Olivo Barbieri, Oliver Boberg, Balthasar Burkhard, Vincenzo Castella, Edgar Cleijne, Stéphane Couturier, Thomas Demand, Andreas Gefeller, Geert Goiris, Andreas Gursky, Naoya Hatakeyama, Todd Hido, Dan Holdsworth, Francesco Jodice, Aglaia Konrad, Luisa Lambri, Ine Lamers, Ze Tsung Leong, Armin Linke, Taiji Matsue, Karin Apollonia Müller, Bas Princen, Thomas Ruff, Frank van der Salm, Heidi Specker, Jules Spinatsch, Thomas Struth, Michael Wesely and Edwin Zwakman.

Geert Goiris, Ministry of Transportation, Tbilisi, Georgia , Russia, 2004 They explored the urban liminal spaces and sites in transformation. Over recent years they have provided inspiration for a whole new way of looking at the city. Thanks to their gaze, places that were once considered 'ugly', such as ports, industrial zones, and modern ruins have acquired a new visual quality and meaning.

We have the emergence of this type of architectural photography emerging in the space that has emerged with the decline of the architectural monograph in codex book form. The latter emerged out of the "architectural photography," practice that was traditionally driven by architecture firms, publishing, and PR. An example is the work of Julius Shulman who codified and promoted the central tenets of architectural photography in the modernist era.

The new approach to urban visualization is urbanistic, yet not beholden to the iconic views required by the architectural visualization industry. This work is concerned with skyscraper squats and other modern ruinations, non-places and junkspace

Rosetta Head looking from King's Beach

The picture below, which is entitled West side of the Bluff or Rosetta Head looking from King's Beach was taken by Ernest Gall, a professional photographer based in Adelaide. The photo was made in 1906.

Ernest Gall, Rosetta Head looking from King's Beach, 1906

Surprisingly, Gall is not mentioned in this resource/archive constructed by the Art Gallery of South Australia, which builds on the R.J. Noye Collection of Photography.This collection presents only the research that Noye had uploaded to the site prior to his death and is therefore incomplete. Nor is Gall mentioned in the Photo-Web archive. His photos of Adelaide can be found at the National Library of Australia's Trove collection.

I'm interested in this picture because I know this section of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula well, as it is were we often walk the dogs when we are down at Victor Harbor. There are not many late 19th C or early 20thC pictures of this coastline on the web.