Paris in Amsterdam

I have just written a piece on Michael Wolf's Paris Street View for edition 22, Peeping, of the excellent Foam Magazine run by the Amsterdam museum of the same name. The museum got as excited as I did about this new series and decided to go the extra mile by putting up an outdoor installation of 24 XXL prints from Paris Street View in Amsterdam's Zuidas area (on the street where Google has its Dutch office) which is in the process of being redeveloped. I made the trip up for the launch and to find out a bit more about the Amsterdam photo scene.

The Paris Street View installation is very impressive (which this terrible installation view taken with my phone camera does not do justice to at all) and the work takes on an added dimension when displayed in amongst the city, rather than just on the neutral white walls of a gallery or museum. Wolf likened it to a "monument to privacy lost" and these massive figures dotted around this modern urban landscape also create an interesting warped sense of scale, making the buildings in the background look like scale models. It will be interesting to see how people in the area react to the works over time and whether the work can provoke some further debate over these issues. (Update: Michael Wolf just kindly sent me some proper installation views so I have uploaded one of these instead).

I also swung by Foam itself. For a museum that only opened in December 2001 in a small European country, Foam cuts an impressive figure on the European photo scene. The venue is not huge, but they use the space intelligently and a look at their programme schedule shows their ability to combine crowd-pleasing fare with 'important' exhibitions.

The current programme is a great illustration of this as the ground floor is occupied by Amsterdam-born photographer and filmmaker, Ari Marcopoulos who has photographed street culture for several years on both US coasts. Although much of the photography in this exhibition left me cold, I was more interested in Marcopoulos's large-scale xerox prints which reveal the influence of Andy Warhol, for whom he was a darkroom printer. But the highlight of It might seem familiar has to be a 10-minute video of Marcopoulos and an accomplice skating down a very steep road in California wearing matching pastel blue suits. This is far more exhilarating and revealing of the culture that Marcopoulos has spent 30 years documenting.

The upper floor is devoted to an exhibition of vintage work by the Russian avant-garde artist, Alexander Rodchenko, which was first held at London's Hayward Gallery in 2008. This is a very complete look at the photographer's extraordinarily inventive and experimental career, from his early use of photography in graphic design in the 1920s to his later work on human movement. Every section of this show contains masterpieces, whether it be the early magazine covers, photograms or photomontages, the portraits or the later work on movement. The prints are all vintage and with a significant number coming from private collections this is a pretty unique opportunity to see this many quality Rodchenko's in one place.

Between Paris Street View, the Rodchenko exhibit and the city of Amsterdam itself, there are more than enough reasons to make a visit.

Review: Stefan Heyne, The Noise

Stefan Heyne's The Noise is aptly named. His images give the impression of being situated between two states, like the static between radio stations. Their subjects, a window, the keel of a boat, a doorway, a phone, are still recognizable but are reduced to the most basic forms emerging from the surrounding darkness. Heyne uses blur to create these abstractions of simple objects in such a way that there is little that is obviously 'photographic' about these images. The essays in the book refer to Gerhard Richter's photorealistic paintings and Heyne's images feel like a similar exploration of the boundary between painting and photography.

The Noise is a collection of controlled experiments at the edge of photography. These are not happy accidents or ultra-loose snapshots, but very deliberate images made which question the nature of photography and of our perception. In some ways this feels like anti-photography, rejecting the sharpness and the detail that is is often equated with photographic perfection in favour of out-of-focus hard-to-read images. Even though Heyne may be deep into uncharted territory, these images are still fundamentally about photography, even though it is a corner of it that few of us spend much time in.

Other adventurous types have wandered into this remote area before, Hiroshi Sugimoto's double-infinity series comes to mind, but Heyne's images feel more purposeful. Less 'let's see what happens' than complex visual conundrums. The images all seem to be emerging from pitch-blackness, as if they were shot from the window of a deep-sea submarine, just short glimpses of a passing object that is already drifting back into the silence and the darkness. And yet, despite all of this I found that the austerity of these images made it difficult to penetrate into this world.

I was surprised to see that Heyne's titles give information about their subjects, although at times this is so general that it reveals little. With abstract photography, I often find that my vision oscillates between focusing on the object being photographed and 'accepting' the form and texture of the abstraction. Because of this I found the titles to be distracting as they keep the images anchored to their subjects, instead of allowing them to move into a different realm.

I am not convinced that the photobook is the best space for this work. The book's three essays (were three really necessary?) refer to Heyne's prints on several occasions and I have the feeling that this work may work better the form of individual images at a large scale.

This is intriguing, adventurous and difficult work that is more of a visual and conceptual work-out than a feast.

Stefan Heyne, The Noise: The Exposure of the Uncertain, (Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, Hardback, 267 x 222 mm, 96 pp, 45 colour plates, 2008).

Rating: Worth a look

Giacomo Brunelli

Giacomo Brunelli is currently showing his work The Animals at London's Photofusion gallery (until March 26th). Brunelli's images have a ferocity that is absent in a lot of wildlife photography. The images are not shot from a human perspective but from that of the animals themselves, which contributes to the immersiveness and energy of the images. This is not a photographic portrait that seeks to emphasize the human traits of animals or the majesty and elegance of the animal kingdom. Brunelli's "animal-focused street photography" highlights the bestial traits of these animals, and the presence of violence and death comes through to powerful effect.

Frauke Eigen, Shoku

Frauke Eigen is currently showing her series Shoku at London's Atlas Gallery. The series is "inspired by recent visits to Japan" and this comes through in both the subject matter and the approach. These black-and-white images are taken right up close to their subject bringing texture and form to the fore. These are arguably distinguishing features of Japanese photography. In general, Western art presents a framed scene where the totality of the subject is displayed, whereas in Japanese art the subject of a piece may be a small detail (please forgive this gross generalisation). This focus on texture and detail has led to some of the great series of Japanese photography, Kikuji Kawada's Chizu (The Map) and Shomei Tomatsu's Nagasaki 11:02, which I posted about on the anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombings.

On first viewing I really liked Shoku. The images, although very different, fit together well to form a coherent series. I particularly like the 'portraits', if they can be called that. The way these are tightly cropped, leaving out the eyes, draw the eye to things that we often don't see, the roundness of a cheek or the slope of an upper lip. The lines of a face or a naked breast combine well with the geometry of a window pane or paving stone (some of these images reminded me of Yasuhiro Ishimoto's New-Bauhaus-influenced early work). But despite all of this, there is a certain orientalist, exoticist quality to the work that makes me a little uneasy. I have seen a couple of interesting posts recently on this issue that I recommend reading. Maybe it is the shots of the fabric of a kimono or of cherry blossoms in bloom, but sometimes the Japaneseness of these images is laid on a little too thick for me. The gallery's spiel doesn't help, but that is to be expected, "a gentle rhythm leads the viewer from one print to the next, always balanced, always serene, an aesthetic of simplicity akin to Zen." I think this bothered me because many of the images manage to take inspiration from a Japanese aesthetic while taking it into what feels like a new direction.

Apparently the prints are on super-matt paper which is laminated with a rice starch. I would like to see the prints themselves as  with subtle work like this, the print is often a crucial part of the work.

Marion Poussier

Marion Poussier has just been awarded the Joy of Giving Something's first artist award (they throw in $15,000 with the award which is nice). I've written about JGS before and I'm glad to be reminded of their great virtual exhibition space. Poussier is a young French photographer, who already has a few interesting series under her belt. JGS are showing work from two of these, One Summer and The Free Movement of Desire. I preferred the latter, which focuses on Israel, Lebanon and Iran. As the title of the series suggests, these images show how love and desire exist in the context of the Middle East. I found it refreshing to see a photographic portrayal of this region where war is not the central focus and where passion and even joy are brought to the fore. Some of these images even have a certain sense of insouciance and normalcy. Poussier's website is a little underdeveloped but you can see more of her work there.

Update (28 April 2010): Poussier just sent me a link to her new website which is much better than the old one!