Carlo Van de Roer capturing the essence

One of the most worn clichés in the realm of photography is the notion that a photographic portrait can somehow "capture the essence" of its subject. This has always struck me as pretty problematic; the idea that there is a moment that can be captured on film that encapsulates some fundamental truth about us, about who we really are seems to be a little reductive... I have always liked to think there was more to me than that. I can understand a photographer's search for an image in which the subject is as natural as possible, forgets the camera and maybe even themselves. However, this may not be any more revealing about the person being photographed than an image in which the subject is playing to the camera, showing another side of themselves in the process.

Whatever your take on the ability of a photograph to capture someone's essence, it turns out that there is a camera that is built to capture something pretty close to it. The aura camera was developed by an American scientist in an attempt to record what psychics might see (or perhaps those that are fond of the odd acidic experiment) when they look at someone's aura. Carlo Van de Roer's Portrait Machine project makes use of the aura camera to show us a few celebrity and other lesser-known auras and raise some interesting questions about the photographic portrait and the roles of the subject, the photographer and the viewer. The camera works by connecting the subject "directly to the camera by hand-plates that measure biofeedback, which the camera depicts as an aura of color in the Polaroid and translates into a printed diagram and description explaining the camera's interpretation of the subject. It also explains separately, what the the subject is expressing and how they are seen by others. ... This printout, which includes information about the subjects emotions, potential, aspirations, future, etc. is presented to the viewer along with each photograph". Click here to see the camera's description of Yoko Okutsu's remarkable aura (above).

If you are feeling inspired by Carlo Van de Roer's work, you might want to try out aura photography for yourself. Luckily it turns out that there is an online specialist aura camera store through which you can buy yourself the necessary equipment. The aura camera is currently discounted to a mere $3,497.00 (a remarkably specific price) and even better, their latest 3.1 version doesn't require those cumbersome hand plates and is a "nicer black color" than the previous one. What on earth are you waiting for?

Ben Roberts: The Gathering Clouds

Summer has well and truly arrived. Every second email I get is trying to sell me my cut-price but nonetheless VIP place in the sun and thousands are hitting the congested roads towards the south for their annual holidays. This got me thinking about Ben Roberts' series The Gathering Clouds which I came across a few months ago thanks to Dan. Roberts started shooting in Spain on the eve of the global financial meltdown which has now got Spain breathing down Greece's neck in the race for the next European economy to collapse. His series shows the fragility of Spain's construction boom and its strangely desolate aftermath. This is by no means a unique case, but I found these images to be an interesting illustration of Europe's increasing precariousness.

Venturing beyond the World Cup

I saw a piece on BBC News yesterday lamenting the fact that most of the football fans who have travelled to South Africa for the World Cup are spending all their time between their hotel and a football stadium and are reluctant to venture any further than that. Apparently tourists have been assailed with warnings about South Africa's astronomical crime rate and are now petrified at the idea of taking any path at all, let alone venturing beyond the beaten one.

While I'm sure that South Africa is not about to win any personal safety awards, there is something a little tragic about the idea that all these people will see virtually nothing of the country itself. My own experience of South Africa is limited to a handful of  photographs that I have seen and a couple of Coetzee's novels so I am no expert, but I thought it was still worth posting this (far from exhaustive) list of a few opportunities to see more of South Africa than a vuvuzela-filled football stadium.

New York's Jewish Museum is currently exhibiting 150 prints of David Goldblatt's photographs of South Africa (May 2 - Sep. 19) as well as four films by the South African artist William Kentridge's Drawings for Projection. A little closer to my neck of the woods, the Centre du Patrimoine Arménien in Valence is showing photographs by Anne Rearick and Guy Tillim on post-Apartheid South Africa. I also recently received a copy of Per Englund's Life Geos On, a bittersweet diary of a handful of summers spent in Cape Town. Try seeing any of these and you'll probably have seen more of South Africa than many of those who will be spending the next month there.

The photographic tinkerers

E and I recently won tickets to a concert by a Congolese band that I had never heard of, Staff Benda Bilili ('benda bilili' means beyond appearances). Apart from the incredible energy that these guys managed to generate despite 80% of the band being paraplegic and all of them living (or having lived) in the gardens of Kinshasa zoo, I was struck by one of the musicians, a teenage boy who somehow managed to extract some pretty amazing sounds out of an electrified tin can of his own conception. This got me thinking about the tinkerers in photography. It's no secret that photographers can be a little gear-obsessed (I think they even give musicians a run for the money in that department) and the explosion of digital and associated software has done nothing to temper that, but are also a few garden shed eccentrics out there who are doing it entirely for themselves.

The most recognized example of this that I could think of is Miroslav Tichý. He was 'discovered' a few years ago, living in isolation in his hometown of Kyjov in the Czech Republic in a house full of self-made photographic paraphernalia of all kinds which he used to surreptitiously photograph the women of his town. Thanks to his seemingly endless supply of completely unique vintage prints (helped by the fact that he had trampled on most of them for several years, before mounting them on cardboard frames which he then decorated himself... any photo dealer's wet dream) he has become extremely hot property and he is now represented by several galleries in Europe alone. While I haven't been swept away by his outsider art, I was fascinated to see the cameras and lenses that Tichý has made and how they had contributed to forging his undeniably unique aesthetic.

In a completely different genre, another photographer who has explored the possibilities of the self-made is Ryuji Miyamoto, who I have written about before on the blog. After many years shooting with a large format camera, Miyamoto developed a desire to be able to climb inside the camera after shooting his series Cardboard Houses on the cardboard structures built by the homeless in different cities. He ended up making a small wooden hut which he transformed into a camera obscura and which he lines with two sheets of light-sensitive photo paper. Miyamoto gets in, lies down and exposes the paper to light. The result is an upside-down image of the world captured in deep blue tones where his silhouette appears at the bottom of the image. Miyamoto's pinhole images and his recent photograms suggest that he isn't exactly enamored by the infinite reproducibility of photography in the digital age.

These are just a couple of examples that came to mind—I would be curious to hear if there are others. Perhaps none of this matters and just as buying the latest top of the line camera will not get you good photographs, building your own is no guarantee of a personal vision. But I like to think that in the process of building the tool with which you are going to photograph the world, there is a small chance of stumbling upon something that we may not have seen before.

Goro Bertz: pissing in the back streets of Shinjuku

When I was in Stockholm for the opening of Tokyo Stories, Maria from the Kulturhuset spoke to me about a young photographer who is half-Swedish and half-Japanese, Goro Bertz. Bertz doesn't have a functional website that I could find, but I did manage to track down some of his images on a few Swedish blogs. Perhaps it's wrong to suggest that Bertz is half-Swedish, half-Japanese. The reason I mention this is because he is clearly influenced by Japanese photography and shoots on the sacred street photography terrain that is Shinjuku, but, although his mother is Japanese he was born and raised in Sweden and is coming to this photography from the perspective of an outsider. What I found particularly interesting in his work is how it seems influenced both by Christer Strömholm and Anders Petersen as well as by Japanese photographers, most obviously Daido Moriyama. He juggles with colour, black-and-white and with different styles, and wears his influences on his sleeve, but I found that he manages to weave these pretty diverse elements into a very coherent whole that feels quite personal and sincere. There is an interesting online exhibition including a long text by Bertz (in English) which gives a good sense of his approach as well as a short slideshow complete with dramatic narration (in Swedish) which are worth a look to see more of his work. Definitely one to watch.