There is an opportunity to exhibit your work at a charity exhibition that will be held in April in London.  The venue is not confirmed yet, but I hear it will be quite a big place around Shoreditch or Spitafields.

Check it out at their website, where you will find out all you need to know about submissions.

I can’t be bothered to put images on this post.  If you don’t know Eggleston’s photographs you are not welcome in this blog!  So don’t miss this exhibition!

I have a soft spot for news print photo publications. Stephen Gill’s The Hackney Rag published by artbeat publishers (Japanese only) and Nobody Books is no exception. Gill has been making curiously interesting work in Hackney for the last decade. He has a peculiar knack for sequencing his lyrically unimposing photographs into quietly seductive books. Included in the newspaper is a signed and editioned print by Gill, which priced at a bit less then twenty pounds at The Photographers’ Gallery book shop is not bad.

Included is a variety of Gill’s projects: Hackney Wick, Buried, Hackney Flowers, Archaeology in Reverse, and previously unpublished work. Gill is a photographer that I’ve grown to appreciate with time; he works primarily with found objects and lo-fi cameras. He shot all of Hackney Wick on a 50p camera that he bought from a flea market. The entire publication has a very un-precious feeling to it, a concept which is probably at the base of Gill’s practice. Hackney itself has changed quite a bit since he started taking pictures there – the slightly lawless marketplace of Hackney Wick has been uprooted by the Olympic stadium site, other parts of Hackney are being re-developed through a gradual gentrification that has already begun to erase some of the idiosyncracies of the area.

I remember I had trouble understanding exactly what it was that Gill’s pictures were trying to tell me when I first saw them. I think I expected a little too much from them. As soon as  I started appreciating them for what they – a sort of softly focused vernacular poetry – the images began to tell me a bit more about themselves. They have a peculiar sense of nostalgia, almost like they are little verses about the relentless passing of time, of time suddenly condensing only to disperse with the next image.

Gill has been running his own publishing company Nobody Books since 2005 in order to supervise first hand the materials, sequencing and production of his books. This DIY attitude is a refreshing break from the often rigid and impersonal publications from larger publishing houses. As Gill writes, “he aims to make books that are conceptually consistent with their content”, something which often lost in precisely manfactured books. This is the aspect that has most attracted me to his work, this constant search for the right form for the content of his books. His de-skilled photographic approach seems to be mirrored by a re-skilling of the distribution of those very images.

What relationship does Ballen have towards the creation of his work? How much is allowed to go unexplained for the sake of art? In his talk he said that he was many things to his subjects, to some a friend, to others a preacher, that he felt he had done his best to help them when he could. It remains that he is aestheticising their condition of living which itself is both a direct and indirect result of the society they live in. Unfortunately, the aestheticisation of social phenomena has led to rather unpleasant results. We need only to think of Benjamin and his idea that it was the aestheticisation of politics lead to Fascism. It is this mystifying capacity of pure aesthetics that lends Ballen’s work an uncomfortable ambiguity. He has erased the traces of his intervention, his direct flash and rigorous composition repeat themselves so as to appear normal. Yet this vision is far from normal, its message much deeper than an appreciation of formal relations.

Blind Woman (1916)

Ed Winkleman wrote an interesting article on the binary opposition between formalism and conceptual art and the blurred boundaries between the two that seems to characterise contemporary art. I would situate Ballen’s work right in the middle of this cusp. He is obviously informed by a very broad history of American formalist photography, from Weston to Evans passing through Strand – whose Blind Woman (1916) could easily pass for an early Ballen piece. What is problematic about this inheritance is of course its well-known deflection of the social in favour of a retreat into the merely visual qualities of the photograph. For anyone remotely interested in the critical capacity of art, this all becomes slightly tiring.

But let’s complicate this reasoning for argument’s sake. Could this openly uncritical presentation of the world be a highly crafted conceptual statement about our desire to demand explanations from difficult images?  Could Ballen in fact be prying precisely on that particular liberal consciousness that objects to images of pain and sufferance while wanting at the same time an explanation of how this suffering is possible?

I asked Ballen what his relationship was to suffering, and in particular to mental suffering – as his subjects seem to be afflicted by all sorts of psychological problems – and he chimed that he didn’t really know what suffering was. If he hasn’t learned what suffering is in the places he has been documenting for the last twenty years, then I fear for anyone who does find the true meaning of suffering. Again this strategy of deflection seems to put me at odds with his work. He is so close to ripping apart the comfortable middle-class calm that seems to have settled over contemporary art, yet never really goes in for the jugular. He says his images are more about gut feelings than mental thoughts, and this energy could easily be harnessed to destabilise the complacency that seems to have run amok in the art world, even when all the conditions seem to be right for a radical re-evaluation of the sustainability of the status quo.

Cut Loose (2005)

Yet he never quite gets there. His latest book, Boarding House is no different. It seems almost a retreat into details, the conspicuous absence of tortured bodies leaves the work rather empty in comparison to Shadow Chamber.  The prevailing sensation is that this destitute periphery will remain to be nothing more than a spectre of aesthetic spectacle, ever more incomprehensible as is it is exponentially beautiful. Perhaps my reaction to his work is so strong because I see such potential in it, and the delusion of watching it dissipate into the vapid mainstream art discourse is what keeps me coming back to it.

Photo by Weegee

I’ve always liked his photographs, Im not a sadist, although there is a derived pleasure when looking at images like this.  I guess that’s what makes Weegee such a great photographer.

There is an exhibition at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London running until the 9th of January 2010.  I sure will have to make some time to go and see it this week.  I was a bit confused when I read at their web page that they are including photographs by Sergei Vasiliev and Stan Healy.  The first photographer that comes to my mind before these two is Enrique Mentinides.

photo by Enrique Mentinides

I ‘ve just erased a paragraph I wrote.  In it I spoke about how art is governed by the market, etc, etc… Anyway, my point was that it would be good to see an exhibition of Weegee and Mentinides side by side.

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Untitled © Tereza Zelenkova

Untitled © Tereza Zelenkova

Talking about haunting photographs.  Have a look at Tereza’s work in progress titled Supreme Vice.  I don’t have much to talk about here, they just get to my guts producing visceral emotions.

“…the work of Roger Ballen is a form of radical, disquieting subjectivism, a psychology of the world itself that represents the inside of politics, the inside of ideology, the inside of ourselves. ” (Cook)

So opens Roger Ballen’s website.  I saw him speak at this year’s Paris Photo with great expectations, partly arising from the reputation he had garnered.  I have to say that I was rather underwhelmed, finding him grossly inarticulate, derivative and demeaning almost to the point of ridiculing his own work.  Perhaps I went into the talk with the wrong mindset,  I probably should have expected that the visceral quality of his images would be coming from an equally visceral man. I was not, however, prepared for the utter lack of responsibility that Ballen seemed to take over the creation of his imaes.

In a nutshell, Ballen takes fantastically composed images of the deprived and disenfranchised underbelly of rural South Africa.  This is something that needs to be seen, I believe.  I also believe that there is more to this world than the formal relations that Ballen ellicits.  Inevitably, any discussion of his work will concentrate on the conditions of its production. Questions of how these images are made, who these people are and how much Ballen interacts with them become fairly standard. We return more or less to the Diane Arbus paradox – what is the photographer’s relationships to these subjects and why are they photographing them. This paradox, for anyone interested in the photographs and not the photographer, become stale fairly quickly. It’s the work we’re seeing, not the artist.

So what is the case for subjectivity in Ballen’s work, how is he showing us the inside of things?

I don’t think he has shown us the inside of anything; he has succeeded in gleening the surface of things but he is far from penetrating them in any meaningfully political or ideological way, as the introduction to his work seems to be arguing. So what is he doing then? Is he expiating our desire to see the brutally bestial condition of man? Is he continuing the comforting reappropriation and neutralisation of the primitive that Dubuffet gave us in painting?

Ballen’s books seem to both threaten and reassure at the same time. The disquieting allure felt moving from image to image, not knowing what aesthetically perfect catastrophe awaits us on the next page is assauged by the fact that we can always close the cover and escape. This pleasure cofirms a sort of mastery over the inexplicable. The gruesome depravation behind the ink of those photographs is neutralised by our own ability to look at it, to marvel at its sheen while our mind revolts it.

More in Part II

Who doesn’t want one of these… the later models have a sonar focusing system which allows you to focus in complete darkness (?? what for ??).

Scott graduated this year from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design with a BFA Photography.  He has produced this wonderful artist book where he explores narrativity through sequencing and the juxtaposition of text.  Both the text and the photographs could be viewed independently, each creating a different story which functions cohesively through repetition and reiteration of photographs and text.  He’s put up a few pages of the book in his webpage, but I recommend that you look at the whole series titled Everything I want it to be / Everything I wanted to be.

His use of repetition to create different narratives, in this case dealing with elements of his personal life in northen USA,  evoke moments in life which repeat themselves and others which are unique, sometimes intentionally sometimes accidentally, sometimes because that’s just how life is.  In it we find ideas of failure, hope, past, present and future.  More over, they present the generational gap between today’s generation of graduates and the previous one.  Perhaps, in a bigger context, a change which is to be expected in the whole of the US in the future.

Scott Ener Grover is definitely a photographer to be followed up close.  Hopefully he will keep delivering and improving his work.