André Kertész @ Photographers' Gallery, London

I made a quick trip over to London last week and managed to squeeze in a visit to the Photographers' Gallery new location on Ramillies Street. Summer shows can often be a disappointment: place-holders while everyone is away on holiday. So this André Kertész show came as a very pleasant surprise.

The show includes mostly vintage prints, taken over a period of 65 years (1915-1980), on the subject of reading. It seems oddly appropriate to have an exhibition of vintage works by one of photography's 'traditional' masters on the act of reading, just when film photography and printed publications are becoming somewhat endangered species. The prints are in excellent condition and the show is a great reminder of just how much of a master of composition Kertész was.

Definitely worth a visit if you are in London. And while you are at it, I would suggest throwing in a trip to the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park. Not to see the Jeff Koons Popeye show, which I really can live without, but to spend a few hours with the Japanese architectural pair, SANAA's excellent summer pavilion.

André Kertész: On Reading The Photographers' Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, London. 17 July - 4 October 2009.

Youngsuk Suh

Thanks to Mrs Deane for switching me on to Youngsuk Suh's work. I am particularly enjoying the Wildfires series and, in the light of Errol Morris's recent post on photographs and the text that accompanies them, the way that the captions make you read these images.

A Pictet puzzle

Apologies readers, but this is going to be another Arles-related post, although with more of a global flavour. One of the night-time projections at the Théâtre Antique this year was the announcement of the 2009 Prix Pictet shortlist. If you haven't come across it before (the prize is only in its second year), it is "the world’s first prize dedicated to photography and sustainability" with a different theme for each year: the 2008 theme was 'Water', for 2009 it's 'Earth'. When I first heard about the prize I wondered if they would be able to avoid lining up a bunch of apocalyptic, catastrophist photojournalism series that would end up looking like a global tour of the world ending. Happily, I think Pictet have avoided that trap pretty well and have managed to include a broad range of subjects and visual and conceptual approaches.

The projection of the 2009 shortlist in Arles was stunning and there is a lot of very strong work in this year's group. It is great to see the diversity of Hatakeyama's work on the contemporary landscape; Ed Kashi's documentation of Nigeria's 'Curse of the black gold' bristles with a dark, visceral energy; and Sammy Baloji's series is a compelling meditation on the relationship of land and history (although not visually my cup of tea). Edgar Martins was also nominated, just a few days after he had that little episode with the New York Times.

Despite the quality of the shortlist, it did make me wonder about the purpose of the prize. I wouldn't question most of the work on show here, even when it does stray a little from the sustainability agenda, as I think that breadth makes the prize more interesting. However, I did have to wonder about a couple of names on the shortlist. Burtynsky's work on quarries is characteristically jaw-dropping, but does he really need the additional exposure? The real shock for me was Andreas Gursky. It would be difficult to argue that the 'Earth' theme has been a significant driving force in Gursky's work, but, more importantly, how ridiculous would it be if he were awarded the CHF100,000 prize!? I can't help thinking that Pictet nominated Gursky in order to raise the profile of the prize rather than the other way around. I hope that that desire for publicity doesn't overshadow the need to reveal new talent.

To end on a positive note, it's worth noting that in addition to the prize itself, one of the shortlisted photographers is invited to complete a commission by Pictet linked to the theme, something which is increasingly rare and still very worthwhile judging by Munem Wasif's 2008 Salt Water Tears project.

(Thanks to Jörg, who was one of this year's nominators, for his thoughts)

Review: Naoya Hatakeyama @ Rencontres d'Arles

As I mentioned in my last post, one of my highlights of this year's Rencontres d'Arles is Naoya Hatakeyama's exhibition at Arles' cloître Saint-Trophime. The exhibition includes two series: Scales, a recent commission for the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Maquettes / Light, a series of images taken ten years ago but which Hatakeyama has only recently found a satisfactory way to exhibit. The first room presents the more recent Scales work which is made up of three parts: a series of five large panels showing a composite aerial view of Tokyo centred on the Mori Art Building, and then two groups of smaller prints of  different scale models of the city of New York: Tobu World Square in Tochigi, Japan and Window of the World in Shenzhen, China.

Hatakeyama, a long-time photographer of architecture, seems to have been drawn towards scale models as they are disappearing from architectural practice. Nowadays the architectural process begins and ends on a computer screen, with photographs of scale models being replaced by print-outs of their computerised cousins. With this in mind, Scales explores the significance of these models just as they are becoming obsolete.

When I first saw the images of Tobu World Square's miniature New York, I was puzzled. These are classic b&w New York cityscapes, so classic that they feel familiar. Most people will have seen photographs of Manhattan's dense, towering architecture that look exactly like these: they have become an almost universal visual vocabulary. It wasn't until I reached an image of a giant man, towering over the tenth story of one of these skyscrapers, that it became clear: this is not New York but a hyperrealistic scale model of the city. The precision of the Japanese model is extraordinary (the website boasts that there are as many as 145,000 "people of 1/25 size" who "live in the park", and no two people are alike) and Hatakeyama's placement of the camera at ground-level and clever use of natural lighting plays off the ubiquity of this type of imagery of New York architecture, making the illusion of a 'real' cityscape complete.

In the second section of the series, Hatakeyama travelled to China, to Shenzhen's Window of the World theme park. Whereas the Japanese created a precise replica of New York based on multiple visits to the city and the use of precise architectural measurements, China's model was based purely on postcards and other images of New York cityscapes. It is essentially a composite representation made up from multiple photographs of the city, and as such it has a strange, removed relationship to New York itself. Hatakeyama chose to shoot these images in color, and the flattened perspective and muted colours of these rickety skyscrapers give the images a painterly quality (he was reminded of Paul Klee's palette when shooting these images). The model is in poor shape and the buildings sit at odd angles to each other, which gives these images a desolate, post-apocalyptic feeling.

The second part of the exhibition is the earlier series of Maquettes / Light. The presentation of these is brilliant: Hatakeyama has found a way of making apparently 'normal' black and white silver-gelatin prints of Tokyo by night emit light (which your computer screen is not going to replicate: see them in person). The brilliant whites and deep blacks of these photographs give the scenes an ultra-vividness. They are no longer photographs of the city, but of light itself. Juxtaposing these with Scales gives the work an added dimension: we are made to question whether we are looking at a real cityscape, or another maquette. However, where the images of Tobu World Square give off a sense of dread at the thought of our world being trapped in a single moment of miniaturised time and space, these Tokyo nightscapes seem to be living fragments of the flow of light and time.

In a year when much of the work on show at Arles felt like a punch in the gut, Hatakeyama's exhibition is a refreshingly seductive, gently provocative invitation to start a conversation. A conversation about the nature of the modern city and the ways in which we attempt to make sense of this reality.

Scales. Maquettes / Light: Tautology of the Image Cloître Saint-Trophime, Arles. 7 July - 13 September 2009.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Further reading: Kultureflash

Arles 2009: 40 years and Nan Goldin

I have finally managed to sit down and collect my thoughts about this year's Rencontres d’Arles festival. For Arles’ 40th anniversary, I decided to try and cover the festival in some detail. In this post I will be giving my overall impressions and in the next few days I will follow up with reviews of the exhibitions that I considered to be highlights.

When it comes to festivals, I have always found that birthdays tend to be mixed affairs (in fairness 40th birthdays have never been easy for anyone). Paying tribute to 40 years of photography while still looking to the future (or at least to the ‘now’) is no small task. Given the mandatory set of exhibitions celebrating Arles glorious past (a tender look at the extraordinarily prolific career of the French publisher and curator, Robert Delpire; an exhibition of new work by Lucien Clergue, an Arlésien photographer and one of the founders of the Rencontres; a Duane Michals retrospective, including a lot of work which has been exhibited before at Arles; and a ‘photo-album’ show allowing the audience to take a nostalgic stroll through 40 years of the festival’s history), the choice of the guest curator was always going to have a big impact, perhaps even more so than in a ‘normal’ year.

Nan Goldin seemed like an interesting choice: despite her rise to fame she remains a prickly, startingly honest, both brutal and fragile creature who will charge straight at anything resembling ‘the establishment’. Having heard her speak several times during the festival (despite lots of official events, she did her rebellious image justice, showing up drunk or very late more than once), she knows her mind and speaks it. Goldin also knows what she likes when it comes to photography. Her 13 guests show her strong leaning towards what could be called a ‘photography of the intimate’: J.H. Engström, Leigh Ledare, Antoine d’Agata, Jim Goldberg, Jean-Christian Bourcart, Annelies Strba. This collection of exhibitions, Ça me touche (It touches me), bears its name well: it came through clearly that this was all work that touched Goldin “in some profound way.” This need to be touched seems to go beyond the work, as Goldin is very close to several of her guests (she referred to Engström and Bourcart’s families as her muses). With two projections of her own work (Sisters, Saints and Sybils and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency) and an exhibition of her personal collection, Goldin’s footprint was stamped forcefully on Arles 2009.

Despite the honesty of her approach and choices, overall I was disappointed. I think Goldin has a real eye for the sincere and much of the work has an undeniable, visceral, emotional power. But, with 13 exhibitions in one massive warehouse space: massive prints of J.H. Engström’s newborn twins and their mother’s bloody placenta; Leigh Ledare’s mother fucking, fellating and stripping for her son’s camera; Antoine d’Agata caught in a 20-year Baconian cycle of drug and sex-addled self-destruction; Jean-Christian Bourcart’s distressing document of the lives of the inhabitants of the US’s poorest city (Camden, NJ); ending with Jim Goldberg’s experimentation with young runaways in San Francisco; can we really be expected to have any emotion left at all? Not all of the work explores the same difficult emotional terrain, but this difference gets diluted by the ‘full frontalness’ of these artists.

There were a few misses (David Armstrong’s beautifully installed and completely forgettable images of young, pretty boys, Christine Fenzl’s worthy but incredibly bland documentation of street football, and Jack Pierson’s large folded photos of stuff that he walked past one day—incidentally Pierson’s ‘statement’ is a must-read), but individually most of the work on show here is interesting (in terms of its approach rather than photographically). Unfortunately, the impact of this work was diluted by the sheer quantity of it. Three exhibitions stood out for me: Anders Petersen’s dark, primitive, but dignified gaze at life on society’s edges, Marina Berio’s beautiful blow-up charcoal drawings of negative images and Lisa Ross’s exploration of the physical manifestations of faith in China’s Xinyiang province.

Towards the end of the festival, I heard Goldin reveal some of her thinking on photography. She explained that for her, photography has almost entirely lost its integrity, that it is difficult to believe images anymore. Of those very few photographers that she still admires, most are dead, and the others she keeps close to her. And as for her own work, she says she no longer has any interest in still photographic images. She only exhibits in the form of projections and she is currently exploring new ideas which move even further away from still photograph. This could be interpreted as pushing the boundaries of photography, but in her case it feels more like she is turning her back on it. I think Goldin remains an interesting artist whose struggle with life continues to provoke her to make challenging and powerful work, but as the guest curator of a major photography festival like Arles, her vision felt too narrow.

My highlights of Arles 2009 (which I will come back to in more detail in further posts) tended to go against the Goldin grain: Naoya Hatakeyama’s Scales and Maquettes/Light, Magda Stanova’s intelligent commentary, Without Sanctuary’s harrowing exploration of the darkest side of ‘vernacular photography’ (if postcards of lynchings can still bear that label), and an event which wasn’t even on the official festival programme, Chambres d’échos, an exhibition of the Musée Reattu’s photography collection which succeeds in creating fascinating resonances from confronting different kinds of work in exhibition rooms set up as echo chambers.

You will probably remember that there was quite a lot of criticism in the blogosphere of this year’s NYPH (somebody still has to explain that ridiculous acronym to me) and I think it is worth remembering that these events are pretty difficult to pull off and the fact that they manage to happen at all is worth applauding. Even if I felt disappointment at some of the choices this year, Arles still manages to be a huge injection of photographic adrenaline in a way that feels festive and celebratory. On it’s 40th birthday Arles felt very much like it was in the middle of a mid-life crisis, but one with glimpses of a promising future.

Update: Further reading Jeffrey Ladd on Nan Goldin Evan Mirapaul on Arles '09