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Today in Italy, car manufacturers promise you that half naked ladies will throw themselves languorously over your car hood if you buy one of their models. Back in the 50s in the US, you would get a supply of Kleenex if you purchased a Pontiac. Photograph by Bill Wood - a commercial photographer in Fort Worth, Texas, whose negatives were bought by Diane Keaton and exhibited at the International Center of Photography.
The show closed a few days ago but i thought it was still worth sharing this image with you. |
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I made it just on time to see the last day of Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video From Japan, an exhibition that closed a few days ago at the International center of photography in Manhattan. The work of the 13 Japanese artists on show visits three main themes. The one i found most fascinating and probably also most Japanese investigates the tension between individual expression and collective identity in contemporary Japan.
She might not be as beautiful as Cindy Sherman but that doesn't prevent Tomoko Sawada to create compelling images. Her "School Days" series shows groups of girls in their high school uniforms lined up in neat rows. At first sight, they are all different. But a closer watch reveals that each of the girl (including the teacher's) has the face of Sawada who with subtlety varies her smile, adds an accessory in her hair, stands with an arrogant stance or adopts a demure posture. What was a sweet and innocent school portraits turns into a satire of Japan's homogeneity and emphasis on conformity (interview of the artist on Pingmag.)
Hiroh Kikai's portraits also talk about individuality. Since 1973 the photographer has roamed the Asakusa district of Tokyo, looking for people whom he defines as having a 'take my picture please' aura. So far he has collected 600 b&w portraits of strangers posing against the blank walls of the Sensoji Temple. Most of the people he selected seem to be ordinary. Yet, there is something definitely unconventional about each of them (more images).
We knew about Masayuki Yoshinaga's portraits of goth-lolitas but the photographer also spent 7 years making portraits of Bōsōzoku, the teenage biker gangs, often linked to the Yakuza. A former member of the Bosozoku himself, Yoshinga managed to get access to their activities and had the gang pose for him.
A second theme in the exhibition examines the relationship of the adult to the child, a key subject in a country facing a rapidly graying demographic.
The installation Blue Cinema in the Woods centers on a child-size movie theater set on the back of an elephant. Outside the theater stands a ventriloquist's dummy called Torayan, who appears frequently in Yanobe's work. Torayan is wearing a mini Atom suit ('Atom' comes from the robot character in Osamu Tezuka' s comic book Astro Boy), a child version of the radiation suit that the artist wore in 1997 when he carried out a performance at Chernobyl. In the video shown inside the movie theater, Torayan appears with Yanobe's father, an amateur ventriloquist. Using American civil-defense films of the 1950s, he instructs Torayan about the measures to be taken if atomic disasters were to happen again.
Miwa Yanagi's b&w photo series, "Fairy Tale," consists of reinterpretations of western stories in a very Film Noir fashion. The protagonists are all young girls. The young girls are set upon by nasty old women but they have very little in common with the Disney-like innocence of their age. They put up a fight and prove not so helpless after all. They use their youth and cunning to triumph in rather heartless fashion over their aged tormentors.
The third theme in the exhibition Heavy Light is the conflict between human culture and nature, best exemplified in the work of Naoya Hatakeyama and Naoki Kajitani.
Hatakeyama being so famous, i'll focus on Naoki Kajitani. The young digital street photographer takes his camera primarily in the Kansai region around Osaka, one of the traditional centers of Japan's "low" entertainment culture. Despite of this clear location, Kajitani's photos are 'generic', they represent fragments of the whole country. One which is saturated with garish commercial imagery. His large-scale, Pop-style photographs shows Japan as a cramped environment saturated with noisy billboards, posters, pachinko parlours, power lines, adult shops and advertising displays that appear both playful and sordid.
In an interview for the catalog of the exhibition, the photographer explained that the areas his work focuses on are being redeveloped at a fast pace and are rapidly disappearing. His work might therefore end up becoming a valuable record of the period he is busy portraying. |
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Riitta Ikonen is one very talented Finnish graduate from the Communication Art & Design department at the Royal College of Art in London. I discovered her work at the Summer show last June and fell in love with her costume projects. I wasn't the only one. She received an Helen Hamlyn Design for our Future Selves award for her project Commuter Thrival, a communication campaign that aims to raise awareness of the issues surrounding public transport in London through posters visualising people's emotions with quirky costumes. The description of her work is delightful: My work is concerned with the performance of images, through photography and costume design. Certain items, usually small and insignificant, excite me to the point where I have to wear them and then document that process. The super- garments I make open up new experiences. In my costumes tremendous things happen - to me and to the people I work with. Today I exploded an egg in the microwave. Next, I want to make an egg costume.
How could i not interview her? Many of your works involve costumes, so one would hastily assume that you are a fashion graduate. In reality, you graduated in Communication Art and Design. Why didn't choose a career in fashion? And why do you often choose costume as a medium to transmit your messages, concerns and ideas? There was a sewing machine in my bedroom when I grew up, and I learned to use it from a very early age. I still like the illusion that I can maintain and make ANYTHING with the skills from my hands. I'm by nature curious about this potential, and think my hands still hold the most decision making power in me. I never rejected the chance of my work being fashion, but thought a fashion degree would have been too narrow for what I wanted to figure out. I wanted to embrace the vernacular through the carefully constructed images in which the outfits form only a part of the story. In a way I did choose fashion, the outfits are vital for the work, just not the pinnacle of it. Communication Art and Design course didn't tie me down to anything too specific and offered seemingly boundaryless opportunities. (Before the RCA I did BA in Illustration in Brighton celebrating the invention of all things Nylon as my final project.) At the moment I do some live commission work, but I feel most at ease printed and mounted quietly on the wall.
Commuter Thrival is a 'communication campaign that aims to raise awareness of the issues surrounding public transport through a series of posters visualizing people's emotions with custom-made costumes'. Did you work on this project with the sole aim to visualize the issues at stake or did you think that these costumes could actually have some therapeutic or cathartic quality on commuters seeing them? As usual, the costumes were made to communicate the issue in the image and not as a live piece. I wanted to visualize the issue to an extent. Eliminating mental space harassment in the Underground is vital. The campaign is meant to be shown on a London Underground platform completely stripped from any extra information/ adverts etc. I wanted to leave enough space for people's own interpretation. In terms of how the posters are situated I tried to give people what they were lacking. The commuters are doing pretty well in the absurdity of the rush hour tunnels, so the campaign is an ode and appreciation to the performers of this daily operation. Could you describe us which elements in the costumes you design correspond to the 3 issues you wanted to engage with? I wanted the images to have a silent potential, giving people headspace in the lack of physical space/ mental cool in the heat of the moment morning rushing.
After some tests the heat costume kept the fiery hot colour and the stiff basic shape, but got much simpler cut and colouring. It is an abstract version of what it used to be- a winged slouch like structure with brightly multi coloured outside.
Daydreaming is solid place to seek solace from when your head is squished into a stranger's armpit in the tube. I thought this would not be a bad place to be instead. An image for fantasizing the journey away.
Most people I interviewed said they weren't keen on making contact with their fellow passengers, which is an awful waste of casual face to face socializing. I was looking into animal shields, scares, warning systems and colours for ways to attract and also repel (you wouldn't want to look too attractive waiting for the night bus in back end of Brixton). A frilled lizard has an excellent collar which I borrowed for this image. It can spread it out for scaring or keep flat for inconspicuous look. The slippery suit is for slick crowd movements (- how smooth it would be if everybody wore them!) Your practice also involves photography. How much staging and preparation did the Commuter Thrival project require? Could you explain us how you selected the location, the model, the light and other elements which played an important role in your photos? The project started with an in depth user research investigation with interviews and involvement all of which provided the starting point for the project.
As I'm usually in front of the camera (only for the heat image for this project though) I work with a trusted photographer, who has quite a strong say on the final images. Most things to do with the image happen before the shoot of course: research, material hunting, costume making, fittings, sketches and location scouting. I wanted the images for this campaign to have nothing to do with the tube, but anything outside it- life, nature etc. Altogether four leaves were sitting in the tree at one point of the shoot, (I had selected a colourful mix of men and women), once again, less was more, and Hitomi on her own in the tree spoke loudest for the lack of space. She is great in front of the camera -perfect stern look. We were lucky on the day of the shoot, especially for the heat we managed to hit on a great sunset in Hyde Park. A lot depends on scheduling, weather and luck when working on low budget. Working on film we can't see the images on the spot, so if things are not right the whole team gets to travel back and forth. (I'm amazed I still have friends with all I've put them through...) Apart from colour adjustments and cropping, I don't photoshop the costumes on the images, they need to be just right on film or we shoot again. For a project called Bird and Leaf we have been traveling to the same location for over a year now with the photographer to get the perfect image for the series... finally, earlier this year it snowed one day when we were all set:
Looking at your portfolio, i had the feeling that humour is important to you. What part does humour play in your work? How does it help communicating an issue? Humour is vital. My work is quite telling of my character. A little humour is very compelling and has access to such a broad audience beyond language barriers. Perhaps humour with my work has a bit to do with being overseas and not quite part of this team here, I'm nearly seeing it like everybody else. Very almost. For more murky issues like global warming the message can cut through a lot of fluff if the humour is done well.
I read somewhere that you received an Helen Hamlyn award for Commuter Thrival. Is it true? Does it mean that you are going to push the project further or that you have other plans for it? It is true, Anja Schaffner, Valerio Di Lucente and I received a Michael Peters award for interdisciplinary collaboration for Commuter Thrival. The project will go public hopefully soon, I'm in talks with the transport for London to get it to the tube in its full glory. It would be very exciting to see it go ahead. Thanks Riitta! All images courtesy of the artist. |
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The always very stern and glum Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Turin is currently running a retrospective dedicated to Ugo Mulas. The focus is on the photographer's relationship with the art scene of his time. Portraits of key figures of pop art, from Leo Castelli to Roy Lichtenstein, coverage of the Venice Biennales from 1954 to 1972, art events, artists, curators and critics living in Italy and New York, etc. A selection:
and of course...
He's not part of the pop family but i couldn't resist hanging a Marcel to the walls:
More pictures this way! If you ever use any, please do not forget to mention the credits. |
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A few steps away from Piazza Duomo in Milan is the medieval Via Mercanti, a pedestrian area which includes Palazzo della Ragione. Founded in 1228, the brick building remained for hundreds of years the centre of the city government and trade.
Disused for some time, the stunning palazzo has been recently revamped to host Unknown Weegee, an exhibition of some 100 photos dating from from 1937 to 1964 and three videos shot by the notorious night-crawler. Large panels hide and protect most of the walls but the contrast between the old frescoes remaining on the walls and Weegee's pictures worked extremely well.
I thought i knew Weegee, the New York photographer who set up his sleeping quarters, photo lab and office inside his two-seater car. The man who listened to his police and fire department shortwave radio while he was in bed. 'Weegee the Famous' who lurked around the darkest corners of Manhattan on the lookout for the next crime, the looming car crash, the upcoming scandal, the starlet sneaking out of the ball room. The guy with a massive camera and a big cigar who always manages to take his subjects off guard.
Unknown Weegee proved me wrong. Of course Weegee did crime scene and villains, he documented life in the city from the 1030s Depression to the postwar period, but he was also keen on bringing into light urban social issues. In 1940, Weegee joined PM, a daily paper conceived as a liberal crusader to fight against oppression, to advocate for the rights of unionists, Jews, and African Americans (text by curator Cynthia Young.) Some of the photos pertaining to this series are deeply moving. I couldn't find any digital version of it online (actually i can't find most f my favourite picture online, which justifies the title of the exhibition after all), but there was one stricking 1941 picture showing a Washington movie theatre divided by a partition: one side of the theatre was reserved for the white and the other for black people. Elsewhere were the homeless, the immigrants, the riots in Harlem, daily tragedies, racism, people struggling to make ends meet, etc.
Unknown Weegee: cronache americane runs at the Palazzo della Ragione, Milan, through October 12, 2008. Photo galleries in kataweb and Panorama (sorry!). The exhibition was shown two years ago in Manhattan, the the new york times has a slideshow and so does the International Center of Photography where all the photos come from. |
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Two nights ago, Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky was speaking at the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, proposing a 10.000-year gallery to go along with the Clock of the Long Now, as part of their Seminars About Long term Thinking.
For those not familiar with the project, among many other endeavors, the foundation is planning to build a mechanical clock in a remote mountain site, designed by Danny Hillis, which will run for ten-thousand years along with a library. Practically all the foundation's projects aim to provide counterpoint to today's "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. The foundation's work is very intriguing in the way that they undertake seemingly vast projects which in turn force their creators to radically re-think many of the notions of today's processes as we are not used to long term thinking, which, as it becomes increasingly clear that our survival might depend on just that. Burtynsky says the clock (which will most likely live at Mount Washington) reminds him of land-art projects like James Turrell's Roden Crater or Walter De Maria's Lightning field, in the way that it might almost become a site of pilgrimage once it will be finished. In order to give the future pilgrims an additional benefit, and also a sort of cultural context out of which the clock was coming from, he thus proposes a gallery of contemporary photography to go along with it, a Long Gallery. As he pointed out, most cave paintings and other archaeological findings like the pornography in Pompeii was simply a testament to that period's system of thinking, and-being a photographer himself-he proposes that we do the same. So what's the case for photography over contemporary art like painting? He says that photography essentially is an outcome of an industrial process, which has been shaped by us, but by which we're also shaped as well. We have personal memories, but often enough they refer to photos that have been taken of us on our way through time, and the very same applies-thinking of iconic historical photos- to humanity as a whole.
Finding a technology for creating ultra-durable photographic prints proved to be quite a challenge. Initially looking at inkjet-prints which might employ the same pigments as highly durable paints used in cars, he ended up with a process which was developed in 1855: the carbon transfer print. This time and money intensive process produces the most durable prints we know, but is somewhat of a dying technology which only a handful of companies in the world still employ. With this project, they also help to revive it a bit. The prints would be applied on special paper, which as opposed to the alternative porcelain, is unbreakable and less sensitive to fluctuations in atmospheric temperature and moisture. However, there's still hope for a much less expensive yet equally durable inkjet-technology to appear before the launch of the gallery in 5-10 years time. So what to show? Burtynsky proposes a range of different exhibitions to be stored with the clock, each curated by another photographer and consisting of approximately 20+ images. He as gathered three proposals so far which are somewhat different approaches to representing the contemporary world:
Canadian photographer Vid Ingelevics proposes a Museum of the Mundane, which would working with the elements of the banal, "stuff that we already feel archival about", as Stewart Brand later put it. The show would consist of images on two sides-side one shows photos of everyday objects taken from two big Canadian archives, one of which belongs to a major department store, mostly items from the past. Side two shows photos of items that will be bought in contemporary dollar-store, representing a more present and probably also more readily disposable world of things. It would be an unofficial poll of the the "true necessities of life", and as such anticipating a future archaeological dig, in most of which usually the mundane is discovered and often most intriguing (see Pompeii pornography) because it shows that people's needs and desires often change very little. The second proposal is curated by Marcus Schubert and would be titled Observations from a Blue Planet. His approach is to collect images from the web, in a found-footage manner and present similarities and differences in the form of diptychs. For Schubert, planet Earth is an "experiment in diversification and consumption" and the juxtapositions (for instance well-fed American families from the sixties and starving families from East Africa, Manhattan and slums and the likes) serve to show us the range of lives that exist within the same environment.
Finally, the third exhibition would be curated by Burtynsky himself, mostly talking photos from his series In the Wake of Progress which he has been working on for 25 years. Most of his work focuses on the notion of industrialization which was created in Europe and in the last centuries has changed our relationship to what we regard as nature as profoundly as probably nothing before. In the process, internal combustion engines have boosted human expansion to the point where in Burtynsky's lifetime, human population has so far more than tripled. His work, mostly landscapes which show how "the surface of the Earth is a skin and [how] we shape it in a certain way", are meant to be reflexions of these relationships. For him, mines are especially iconic, since it has been natural resources like metals and especially oil (driving the engines) for which the Earth is being reshaped in many places. Burtynsky has taken many photos of mines, for instance the largest copper mine in the World in British Columbia, or more recently the oil sands of Northern Alberta where oil-soaked bitumen is being converted into oil in what is currently the largest surface-engineering project on the planet, and they've only touched 1% of the area. The forest that is standing on top (sometimes called "The right lung of the Earth") of the sand is being cleared and this and other reasons cause the oil to have a four times larger carbon footprint than even regular oil. For this reason, the state of California is refusing to import oil from this source.
Other impressive examples include 40 million tires that had been dumped outside of Modesto, California in a field so massive that a power plant was built to turn the tires into energy, halfway through which the field caught fire and the project had to be abandoned. Or spaces in granite-mines in Vermont and the famous marble-quarries in Carrara, Italy, where the removal of giant cubes of stone has created an "inverted architecture" of sorts, just as copper and ore-mines often create inverted pyramids into the ground.
More recently, Burtynsky has focused on the notion of globalization and received a lot of acclaim for his large-scale images of Chinese factories (with a mobile workforce currently in the range of 100 million people) and Bangladeshi ship-breaking yards. This he argues, "is the export of ideas from the west, unbolted and transported to China" to become the world's factory. Which is consistent with the notion that his images are trying to connect us to the earlier ages of our industrial society-a world that still exists, but has been moved out of sight for many Westerners, which is why these photos today serve a particular role. UPDATE: Long Now have just published the talk as an MP3 and you should also be able to subscribe to the podcast (which you should do anyway) and get it. Related: Chinese industrialization |
