It seems like street photography has become deeply unpopular in some fine art photography circles. I don't fully agree with all of the negative arguments being put forward, but a brief search on flickr reveals just how much more-or-less technically proficient street photography with nothing to say is being made these days. With Babel Tales, Peter Funch, a Danish photographer based in NYC, plays around with the conventions of street photography to create a series of extraordinary 'snapshots'. These images all give the illusion of capturing the infamous 'decisive moment', but the moments in Babel Tales are all decisively fabricated. Funch stakes out the same street corners for days on end and then pieces together his images to create composites which feel like extraordinary one-off snapshots. Looks like street photography, smells like street photography...but is it street photography?
mus-mus @Paris project
It seems like Paris may be having a bit of a revival as a photographic subject with Eggleston's Paris commission for the Fondation Cartier and now this: mus-mus, the mysterious people behind the @600 project, are back with the @Paris project. As for @600, this project will collect images of Paris by photographers from all over the world taken any time before 14 July 2009. For the jury they have managed to secure the services of Stephen Shore and Gil Blank. (via Mrs Deane)
Horses Think @ Michael Hoppen Gallery, London
It is always nice to see a fellow photography blogger making things happen. Ofer Wolberger of Horses Think is going to be exhibiting his works at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London from June 4th to July 25th.
Is tilt-shift photography's auto-tune?
There has been a big debate going on in the musical blogosphere about the auto-tune. Kanye West has his fair share of responsibility for this as his last album, 808s & Heartbreak, didn't contain any rapping whatsoever and just involved him warbling into his vocoder. This man cannot sing to save his life (if you listen to the live versions of any of the "808" tracks, even through an auto-tune his voice manages to be ropey), but he decided that sing he would by getting a computer to do it for him. There is a lot of hate for the auto-tune as people see it as a way of hiding a total lack of ability behind a vocal gadget. In theory I would tend to agree with this perspective, and yet I liked Kanye's album, and I think the auto-tune has been used brilliantly in other contexts (see DJ/rupture for more on this).
Recently, has had me wondering whether photography has found its equivalent of the auto-tune bête noire with the explosion of the tilt-shift phenomenon? In the last year or so, tilt-shift has been spreading across the globe like swine flu (I think flickr may actually end up losing an arm to it), to the point where if you can't be bothered to figure out how to take a tilt-shift photograph, this program will make one for you from. Whereas I actually fall into the pro-auto-tune camp (although I am still pretty close to the fence) I have less patience for the tilt-shift phenomenon. I think this is a case of the technique (gimmick?) being too overwhelming for there to be room to do anything personal or individual with it. Monsieur Colberg recently commented on something similar in regard to Thomas Ruff's recent "jpegs": the difficulty of getting beyond the technique to the idea. I don't think tilt-shift is inherently evil...I even sort of liked Naoki Honjo's Small Planet, which is one of the recent 'fine art' contributions to the t-s world. However, I can't help wondering if the series works despite the technique rather than because of it.
Taisuke Koyama
During my exceedingly short trip to Tokyo earlier this month, a friend of mine took me on a whirlwind up-and-coming-photography tour of Tokyo. First stop was at the G/P Gallery, in the new NADiff a/p/a/r/t art complex in Ebisu (which incidentally has an excellent art bookstore). They had a small solo-show (14 prints) of the young photographer Taisuke Koyama's entropix series. I had made a mention of Koyama's work in the piece I wrote for Images magazine last year highlighting some of the Japanese photography on show at the 2008 edition of Paris Photo. I didn't get to see enough of his prints at the fair, but I found the couple of images that I did see interesting.
Entropix is a series of visual fragments, seemingly haphazard abstractions that still retain a link to their subject (paint peeling, pink fabric, tarmac, sheet metal). The images are highly detailed, feeling like microscopic, molecular studies of the surfaces of the city. Koyama's compositions are both strong and simple, and they retain an instinctive energy reminiscent of Eggleston's shotgun approach. The (digital) prints are good, although I prefer the smaller prints to the larger edition (1.2 x 1.8m), which I found diluted the impact of the images a bit.
I ran into Koyama later on that evening at a discussion organised by Akira Rachi at CAMP in Hacchobori (more on this later) where he was presenting entropix and had a chance to chat briefly to him. He will be coming to Paris Photo with G/P again this year so this will be a chance to see more of his work. And if you don't feel like waiting until then, a catalogue of the series is also available from G/P. One to watch.