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Wednesday, 20 June 2012

Peter Fischili & David Weiss


Peter Fischili & David Weiss


Euan Spencer



Ewan Spencer




Pieter Hugo



Pieter Hugo




Martin Parr



Martin Parr



Damien Blottiere

Cut and Paste: Damien Blottiere's hand-made photographs


Image © Damien Blottiere.
His collaged assemblies are in hot demand in the fashion industry, and yet Damien Blottiere doesn’t think of himself as a photographer so much as an imagemaker within a team.
Author: Diane Smyth
“I have an unusual background,” admits Damien Blottiere, whose “hand-made” imagery for brands such as Stella McCartney and Pierre Hardy have caught the eye of the fashion cognoscenti. “I would say that fashion brings me to photography, not the other way round,” he says, referencing his early career as an aspiring designer.
The Frenchman studied fashion design at the École Duperré in Paris, then assisted fashion editor Yasmine Eslami, working on titles such as Purple, Libération Style and Mixte, before a step up to styling in his own right led him in another direction. Although he had been cutting up images and taking his own photographs since college, it was Cathy Edwards, the former fashion editor at Dazed & Confused, who spotted his potential and gave him his first commission.
Blottiere still shoots for the magazine, alongside other titles such as Tokyo-based biannual, Commons & Sense Man (who commissioned him to do the shoot shown here), and having signed up with the prestigious Artlist agency, he’s taking on more advertising commissions for fashion brands such as Hermès and Carven. But for all this, Blottiere considers himself an imagemaker or collagist rather than a photographer, even though he shoots all the work he cuts up, and says he relishes this part of the process. “What I like the most about fashion photography is working with a team,” he explains. “I always feel grateful when a team of other artists joins me to do something. Everyone comes with his or her own talent for a common project – I don’t know so much about hair and make-up, I’m not a stylist and I’m not a model. Without them, fashion photography doesn’t exist. They feed me their creativity in a way.”
This team effort means Blottiere is often “surprised by unexpected things that others can create during the shoot”, and he says he’s always open to others’ ideas, even if he’s got a plan in mind. He needs to be alone to “let his hands do the work” on his collages though, although he will sometimes let others in on the development. He used to be inspired by his own fantasies, but these days he’s more interested in his subjects. “I’ve always been fascinated by bodies and I try to go underneath as well as around them,” he says. “I try to combine imagines of different times, perceptions or points of view. For example, on one picture I will show my subject dressed, getting dressed and naked, all at the same time. I’m probably greedy and unsatisfiable so I need to gather different parts or moments to show what my subject wants me to tell or what I want him to say.”
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Image © Damien Blottiere.
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Image © Damien Blottiere.


Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/project/2107257/cut-paste-damien-blottieres-hand-photographs#ixzz1yKSPtue8
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Luke Norman and Nik Adam.

El Plus En: Ellerker Gardens

el-plus-en-12
Image © Luke Norman & Nik Adam.
El Plus En’s latest project is an unsettling trip into the subconscious and an unusual take on the photographic series
Author: Diane Smyth
It’s 18 months since El Plus En (Luke Norman and Nik Adam) featured on these pages, shortly after graduating from the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) in Farnham. In that time, the duo have travelled to India and the US to create projects, been taken up by a Swedish gallery, and had work published in Foam, Source and Wallpaper* magazines. And that’s just for starters; they also founded the Wandering Bears collective with fellow photographer Peter Haynes, curating exhibitions for Margate Photo Festival and Brighton Photo Fringe’s Open 11.
Now they’ve produced a new series, Ellerker Gardens [above], the first project they’ve shot entirely digitally. “It was a long process for us to get used to,” says Norman. “Initially we would look at every image immediately unsatisfied, an experience we were new to as normally we’ve had to wait for development periods before we could reflect on the images.”
They shot the project in two makeshift sets, one put together in Adam’s father’s house while he was on holiday, the other at UCA, where they had a residency. They used makeshift spaces, which meant they had to think creatively, they say, and the project took an imaginative turn, combining portraits and still lifes, colour and monochrome shots to represent the subconscious. Initially planning to pair the stills lifes alongside the portraits, they later decided this format was too rigid and opted to let each image stand on its own, an unconventional approach that nevertheless went down well when they presented the project as a slideshow at the Arts Forum.
“We wanted to focus on the ‘in-between’, the volatile state of mind in which instability manifests itself, where an uncertain state of mind can produce dark and bizarre outcomes,” says Norman. “The idea is all about letting go; you have to fall out of reality to engage with the pictures – the pictures are there to trigger thoughts inside your head,” adds Adam. “I think the best way to view this work would be to spend an evening with it. It’s a very tricky project to explain because, essentially, we were looking into our own thoughts and what occurs in our own minds. But hopefully the essence of the picture is captured, and therefore a viewer can translate that to their own thoughts and interpretations.”
el-plus-en-13
Image © Luke Norman & Nik Adam.
el-plus-en-02
Image © Luke Norman & Nik Adam.


Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/project/2127272/el-plus-en-ellerker-gardens#ixzz1yKNAPYEN

Natasha Caruana

Impersonal portraits

natashacaruana
An anonymous bride selling her dress online, from the project Fairytale for Sale compiled by photographer Natasha Caruana


Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/report/2107289/-impersonal-portraits#ixzz1yKMiZWyV

On Show: Ori Gersht's This Storm Is What We Call Progress

gersht2
Image © Ori Gersht.
Ori Gersht opened his first UK museum solo show recently, not at an art gallery but at London's Imperial War Museum. The display presents two dual-channel film pieces and a new body of stills.
Author: Joanna Cresswell
Often drawing on wider themes of history, conflict, time and landscape, Ori Gersht explained the nature of his process in saying, "Scars created by wars on our collective and personal memories are at the essence of my practice. In my work I often explore the dialectics of destruction and creation, and the relationships between violence and esthetics."
The show opens with a beautiful print of ‘Against the Tide: Isolated', from a new series of photographs entitled Chasing Good Fortune. The project is an exploration of the shifting symbolism of the Japanese Cherry Blossom. With its early links to Buddhist concepts of renewal, Gersht translated this idea into the field of conflict and photographed clusters of Cherry Blossom at sites in Hiroshima where trees grew in contaminated soil. Cherry Blossom also came to be linked with Kamikaze soldiers during the Second World War, and Gersht spent time photographing its presence at memorial sites too.
Many of the images were taken digitally at night in poor lighting conditions, and as a result have a strangely disjointed and textural quality. They are like fragments of rich tapestries; woven with layer upon layer of history and meaning. The fragmented quality of the images also raises questions about the reliability of the medium as a tool for truth, which conversely is another theme interweaved through Gersht's work.
Whilst these stills are seductive and pictorially beautiful, the real stars of the show are undeniably each of the dual-channel film pieces, artfully recounting the lives of two people shaped by their (very different) experiences of the Second World War.
gersht3
Image © Ori Gersht.
Evaders is the first of the two-screen video pieces. The film begins with a haunting recital from a section of an essay Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940, from which the show takes its name. Benjamin sets out to describe the plight of the ‘angel of history' that he sees in Paul Klee's 1920 painting ‘Angelus Novus'. Benjamin wrote of the painting, ‘the angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress'.
Benjamin's tragic (but unfortunately not uncommon) personal story reveals that he struggled across the mountainous path of the Pyrenees Lister Route in an attempt to escape Nazi-Occupied France. Upon finding the border closed when he reached Spain, Benjamin took his own life instead of returning to France.
Taking inspiration from this physical struggle through such a dramatic environment alongside the ideas Benjamin posited within his texts, Gersht touches on an array of cultural, physical and psychological borders, ultimately exploring ways of representing transition. In the film, we see a man struggling against the cold, pressing ever onwards with his journey, as the snow falls ever earthwards. The repetition of this struggle, and the sense that there is no real progress - just a cycle repeating itself - as he fades and flickers into blackness every so often is compelling, though difficult to watch. The beauty of the landscape juxtaposed against his pain is exquisite.
The second film piece Will You Dance For Me? Introduces us to glimpses of 85-year-old Israeli, Yehudit Arnon as she dips in and out of the light whilst rocking back and forth on her chair. Arnon recounts the experience of being a young woman in Auschwitz and the consequences of refusing to dance at an SS Officer's Christmas party. As punishment, she spent the whole night standing barefoot in the snow. The very same night, Arnon vowed that if she were ever to leave Auschwitz alive, she would dedicate her life to dance.
gersht1
Image © Ori Gersht.
We watch mesmerised as, bathed in light, Arnon is slowly transported back to her time on the stage, a vague smile creeping across her face as her body moves in tiny, almost non-existent contortions - some semblance of a last dance forming as she remembers her days dancing in the spotlight. She looks frail and small, flicking in and out of the immersive darkness, just as the snow repetitively continues to fall each time the video loops beside her. There is the innate feeling of a woman whose experiences whose strength is fading, but whose spirit defies. In each of the two film pieces the snow is a kind of melancholic beauty that masks the brutality that we know is behind it.
To have the show in an environment such as the Imperial War Museum, instead of a gallery space, is inspired. Gersht has spoken before about his constant struggle with ‘the difficulty of representing violent history', and as a result of the nature of his practice, the risk of being seen to aestheticise or poeticise war is high. However in this sense, the work is placed within a wider context, housed in the same place as artifacts and figures and the grittier realism of war and can be appreciated as an alternative way of representing and remembering conflict. Gersht seems to approach his subject with all of the sensitivity and sincerity expected of a photojournalist when documenting war zones.
The only major gripe to have with the show is that the sound from each film piece bleeds into the other at certain points. It would have been more enjoyable to see each piece contained, completely exclusive of each other. Aside from this, the show is a stunning overview of Gersht's recent work and goes a long way to firmly establishing his name in the UK.
Ori Gersht: This Storm Is What We Call Progress is on show until 29 April at the Imperial War Museum in London. For more details, visit http://www.iwm.org.uk/exhibitions/ori-gersht-this-storm-is-what-we-call-progress.
gersht4
Image © Ori Gersht.


Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/feature/2152790/-ori-gershts-storm-progress#ixzz1yKM1vxfT
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On Show: Ori Gersht's This Storm Is What We Call Progress

gersht2
Image © Ori Gersht.
Ori Gersht opened his first UK museum solo show recently, not at an art gallery but at London's Imperial War Museum. The display presents two dual-channel film pieces and a new body of stills.
Author: Joanna Cresswell
Often drawing on wider themes of history, conflict, time and landscape, Ori Gersht explained the nature of his process in saying, "Scars created by wars on our collective and personal memories are at the essence of my practice. In my work I often explore the dialectics of destruction and creation, and the relationships between violence and esthetics."
The show opens with a beautiful print of ‘Against the Tide: Isolated', from a new series of photographs entitled Chasing Good Fortune. The project is an exploration of the shifting symbolism of the Japanese Cherry Blossom. With its early links to Buddhist concepts of renewal, Gersht translated this idea into the field of conflict and photographed clusters of Cherry Blossom at sites in Hiroshima where trees grew in contaminated soil. Cherry Blossom also came to be linked with Kamikaze soldiers during the Second World War, and Gersht spent time photographing its presence at memorial sites too.
Many of the images were taken digitally at night in poor lighting conditions, and as a result have a strangely disjointed and textural quality. They are like fragments of rich tapestries; woven with layer upon layer of history and meaning. The fragmented quality of the images also raises questions about the reliability of the medium as a tool for truth, which conversely is another theme interweaved through Gersht's work.
Whilst these stills are seductive and pictorially beautiful, the real stars of the show are undeniably each of the dual-channel film pieces, artfully recounting the lives of two people shaped by their (very different) experiences of the Second World War.
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Image © Ori Gersht.
Evaders is the first of the two-screen video pieces. The film begins with a haunting recital from a section of an essay Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940, from which the show takes its name. Benjamin sets out to describe the plight of the ‘angel of history' that he sees in Paul Klee's 1920 painting ‘Angelus Novus'. Benjamin wrote of the painting, ‘the angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress'.
Benjamin's tragic (but unfortunately not uncommon) personal story reveals that he struggled across the mountainous path of the Pyrenees Lister Route in an attempt to escape Nazi-Occupied France. Upon finding the border closed when he reached Spain, Benjamin took his own life instead of returning to France.
Taking inspiration from this physical struggle through such a dramatic environment alongside the ideas Benjamin posited within his texts, Gersht touches on an array of cultural, physical and psychological borders, ultimately exploring ways of representing transition. In the film, we see a man struggling against the cold, pressing ever onwards with his journey, as the snow falls ever earthwards. The repetition of this struggle, and the sense that there is no real progress - just a cycle repeating itself - as he fades and flickers into blackness every so often is compelling, though difficult to watch. The beauty of the landscape juxtaposed against his pain is exquisite.
The second film piece Will You Dance For Me? Introduces us to glimpses of 85-year-old Israeli, Yehudit Arnon as she dips in and out of the light whilst rocking back and forth on her chair. Arnon recounts the experience of being a young woman in Auschwitz and the consequences of refusing to dance at an SS Officer's Christmas party. As punishment, she spent the whole night standing barefoot in the snow. The very same night, Arnon vowed that if she were ever to leave Auschwitz alive, she would dedicate her life to dance.
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Image © Ori Gersht.
We watch mesmerised as, bathed in light, Arnon is slowly transported back to her time on the stage, a vague smile creeping across her face as her body moves in tiny, almost non-existent contortions - some semblance of a last dance forming as she remembers her days dancing in the spotlight. She looks frail and small, flicking in and out of the immersive darkness, just as the snow repetitively continues to fall each time the video loops beside her. There is the innate feeling of a woman whose experiences whose strength is fading, but whose spirit defies. In each of the two film pieces the snow is a kind of melancholic beauty that masks the brutality that we know is behind it.
To have the show in an environment such as the Imperial War Museum, instead of a gallery space, is inspired. Gersht has spoken before about his constant struggle with ‘the difficulty of representing violent history', and as a result of the nature of his practice, the risk of being seen to aestheticise or poeticise war is high. However in this sense, the work is placed within a wider context, housed in the same place as artifacts and figures and the grittier realism of war and can be appreciated as an alternative way of representing and remembering conflict. Gersht seems to approach his subject with all of the sensitivity and sincerity expected of a photojournalist when documenting war zones.
The only major gripe to have with the show is that the sound from each film piece bleeds into the other at certain points. It would have been more enjoyable to see each piece contained, completely exclusive of each other. Aside from this, the show is a stunning overview of Gersht's recent work and goes a long way to firmly establishing his name in the UK.
Ori Gersht: This Storm Is What We Call Progress is on show until 29 April at the Imperial War Museum in London. For more details, visit http://www.iwm.org.uk/exhibitions/ori-gersht-this-storm-is-what-we-call-progress.
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Image © Ori Gersht.


Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/feature/2152790/-ori-gershts-storm-progress#ixzz1yKM1vxfT
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Still Life

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Dessert, about 1923. Frederick G Tutton, The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media museum SSPL
Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2154236/art-arrangement-photography-life-tradition-goes-national-media-museum#ixzz1yKL5DA00

Jez Coulson

The dynamics of street photography with Jez Coulson

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Image © Jez Coulson, courtesy of World Photography Organisation.


Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/q-and-a/2167770/dynamics-street-photography-jez-coulson#ixzz1yKKGwjFR

Sabine Mirlesse

Sabine Mirlesse: As if it Should Have Been a Quarry

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Image © Sabine Mirlesse.
Photographer Sabine Mirlesse turns her attention to Iceland for her latest body of work "As it should have been a quarry"
Like so many artists and photographers before her, Sabine Mirlesse had always been intrigued by Iceland, mainly because it exists on a continental divide, making it the site of frequent seismic activity.
Inspired by the story of a small village that was blanketed in ash and lava following a volcanic eruption in the 1970s, the Paris-based photographer arrived on the island with little idea of what to expect, but ended up staying for three months. Travelling on the back of an invitation from the Association for Icelandic Visual Artists, she pursued the story of the village as the basis for a new body of work titled As if it should have been a quarry.
"The inhabitants of the town chose to dig up their homes and continue living there," she explains. "All but a few houses were not only salvaged but restored, and now you wouldn't necessarily know that the entire village was once buried in the ground. The work began with this story and then evolved based on the complex relationship I found Icelanders to have with their landscape - a landscape constantly in flux."
It proved a ripe subject for Mirlesse, who says she uses photography "to explore the person as landscape... holding histories as complex and unique as the experiences of any one individual, holding layers of years and weather gone by". The American- born photographer says she is looking at "how a single image can move the viewer to a memory of his or her own - how the familiarity of the photographed can work as a trigger for one's past and draw it into the present, creating a very immediate experience of the passage of time."
Right now she needs more time to finish her project. "There are a few stones left unturned, a few more people I want to speak with, and one more region I want to visit for the project," which, she hopes, will then be published in book form.
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Image © Sabine Mirlesse.
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Image © Sabine Mirlesse.
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Elliot Erwit

Bruce Davidson

Jessica Eaton

Jessica Eaton wins the Hyeres photography prize

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Canadian photographer Jessica Eaton has scooped the Photography Jury Grand Prize at this year's Hyeres Festival of Fashion and Photography. Image © Jessica Eaton.


Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2171443/jessica-eaton-wins-hyeres-photography-prize#ixzz1yKHqR27s
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Mishka Henner

Less is More: Mishka Henner's take on Robert Frank's classic

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Hoboken © Mishka Henner.
For his latest project exploring digital appropriation, Mishka Henner turned to “the Bible” of photobooks, Robert Frank’s 1958 classic, Les Américains. Colin Pantall finds it a thrilling example of a new trend in photography towards using techniques such as subtraction to make new images from old.
Author: Colin Pantal
Take the 83 images from Robert Frank’s 1958 classic, Les Américains. Use Photoshop to erase half the content. Leave some hats and chairs and jukeboxes. Add an “s” to the title and you have Less Américains, Mishka Henner’s latest book project, and the most striking example of his ongoing use of new technologies to illuminate the past and invigorate the present.
Despite Henner’s work with new media and appropriated images, he has his roots in more traditional documentary photography. “What drew me into photography was discovering the Dusseldorf School,” he says. “They were producing these pictures of urban places, and I thought if you can photograph an industrial estate and come up with something profound, I want to be part of that.
“I found that I could discover something new by pointing a camera, but the more proficient I became with the language of photography, the more frustrated I was with it. I wanted to find new ways of communicating, but the Photography world with a capital P can be quite conservative. I needed to go beyond it; I needed to get my work seen by people outside photography. One of the things that frustrates me is how photography is often taught according to a set agenda of what is good; and looking at photography in this way can be so restrained and narrow. We’re surrounded by cameras, and from a basic point of view, that changes the way we function. We don’t need to carry a camera around with us all the time any more because everything is being photographed in any case.”
Old into new
Henner has shown an ability to move beyond the photographic audience in his prolific output, which combines the simple and the inspired. Last October he published Astronomical, a 5000-page, 10-volume scale-reproduction of the solar system, a planetary parallel of Ed Rushka’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Earlier in the year he published No-Man’s Land, a book that combined the surveillance element of Google Street View with an online social network for Italian men to share locations for street prostitutes.
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Canal Street © Mishka Henner.
No-Man’s Land was exhibited at the Les Rencontres d’Arles festival last year, as part of the From Here On exhibition (curated by Clément Chéroux of the Pompidou Centre, along with artist/photographers Martin Parr, Eric Kessels, Joachim Schmid and Joan Fontcuberta), which focused on digital appropriation. The show’s manifesto remains apt to Misher’s approach, pronouncing that the endless possibilities of making “...work that turns old into new, elevates the banal. Work that has a past but feels absolutely present. We want to give this work a new status. Things will be different from here on.”
It’s a manifesto opposed to the idea of the purity of photography, opposed to the idea that there is one right way of doing things. “An example of this, is a student who told me she hadn’t taken any pictures all week and had nothing to show me,” says Henner, who is a visiting lecturer at Stockport College and the University of Central Lancashire. “I asked her if she had uploaded anything to Facebook and she said yes, loads of pictures. But she couldn’t see that the Facebook pictures were just as valid and maybe even more interesting than what she saw as the ‘Proper Photographs’.”
It was with this perspective that Henner began working on an idea around Frank’s classic. “I had been making quite a lot of work that is about photography, and I love the photobook. My background is in documentary, so I thought if I’m going to remake a photobook, I should start with the Bible – Les Américains.
“There’s a fetishisation of vintage work where the images are seen as untouchable; but we are living in a digital age where data can be wiped out immediately and our relationship to images has changed how we see and process photographs. Images circulate incredibly freely and rapidly and then, just as quickly, they disappear and the memory is lost. With Less Américains, I want to ask what happens when you do that to older work, where on the one hand the images are recognisable, but on the other they are also new images.
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Arriere Cour © Mishka Henner.
“Initially I wasn’t sure about what I wanted to do apart from erase [aspects of the images]. I was inspired by Robert Rauschenberg who did erasure when abstract expressionists like William de Kooning were dominating the art world in the 1950s. He wrote to William de Kooning and asked for a picture to erase. De Kooning liked the idea and gave him a picture that Rauschenberg erased and exhibited – which de Kooning didn’t like. So Rauschenberg’s response to this dominant art form was to erase one of the biggest abstract expressionists of the time.
Rauschenberg’s erasure of the picture did two things; it destroyed de Kooning’s work and it created a blank space – but with the proviso that blank spaces are never blank, they always have the trace of something unseen. In that sense, the act of erasure can be seen as both destructive and creative.
That creative/destructive element is addressed in a huge number of contemporary photographic works, and notably evident in Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s People in Trouble Laughing Pushed to the Ground. In this series, the duo removed stickers that had been placed on photographs in the Belfast Exposed Archive, then enlarged the previously hidden sections of the images. Here the blank space of the sticker really isn’t blank; it’s a kind of negative space that comes with an archaeology, and an excavation of the image (through peeling back the sticker) reveals what lies beneath – the detritus of everyday visual life in the politically charged archive environment of the Belfast archive.
However, instead of opening up negative spaces, Henner creates them with Less Américains, but at the same time preserves enough so that the book is also a visual reading guide to the work of Frank.
There are different ways of looking at Henner’s erased pictures; sometimes you look at what is left; the hats and haircuts for example. Here the blank space is more of a white space backdrop. But sometimes you look at what has been taken out; the silhouettes of bodies and faces that aren’t there, the graphics and the flags that have gone missing. These blank spaces are negative spaces, where what is missing lies at the heart of the blankness.
And then you end up flicking between the negative space and the positive idea and you wonder what you recognise and what you don’t. Next, you start seeing the links between pictures and building up alternative narratives in your head. And if you have a copy of Frank’s book to hand, then it’s not long before one is flicking back between the two versions to see what has gone, what remains and what has changed in the way you read each version.
Erasing the past
Henner is not the first person to erase pictures. Go back a century and Edward Curtis was using basic manipulation to erase signs of modernity in order to preserve a particular image of Native Americans as people untouched by Western civilisation. Move forward into Stalin’s Soviet Union and you’ll find people disappearing from official images as they fell out of favour with their dear leader.
More contemporary erasures include the work of artists such as Ken Gonzales Day, who erased the main subjects and the ropes from which they hung from his pictures of US lynchings. The effect is to divert the attention from the victims to the crowd viewing the spectacle.
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Rodeo © Mishka Henner.
Gregor Graf erased the signs in his Hidden Town pictures of London, Linz and Warsaw. There are no cars or people in Graf’s pictures, and because there is no graphic “noise”, his cities become interchangeable, depersonalised non‑communities. They look more like film sets than real cities, a kind of Poundbury or Pyongyang, somewhere between utopia and dystopia.
Even more relevant to Henner’s work are Pavel Maria Smejkal’s Fatescapes, which takes iconic photographs and erases the main players. So, instead of a naked Vietnamese girl running down a road screaming, followed by US soldiers in the background (Nick Ut’s Children Fleeing an American Napalm Strike), we get an empty street with a road sign to one side and a dark black cloud in the background. In another, shot by Charlie Cole in 1989, we see just the road markings on Changan Avenue crossing Tiananmen Square, while in a different picture, captured by Yevgeny Khaldei in 1945, only statues look down from the Reichstag rooftop to the streets below in Berlin.
But even with the figures removed, one can still recognise the seemingly anonymous landscapes that background Kevin Carter’s Pullitzer Prize winning photograph from Sudan, or Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier shot in Andalucia. And when you look at the empty pictures, you look at them more intently, taking in every blade of grass, every crack in the tarmac, as though trying to project the iconic element that has been removed onto the banal landscape that remains.
This interest in removing part of an image is more organic in the work of Stephen Gill, Seba Curtis and Dean Chapman. Gill’s Buried shows pictures that have been dug into the ground at varying depths – and the effect that burial has had on them. Both Curtis’ Drowned (BJP #7791) and Chapman’s Fading Memories show pictures from family albums that have been destroyed by flood waters, the latter work coming from the Japanese tsunami. Cracked, faded and infested with mould, the remnants of prints show eyes and faces devastated by the ravages of nature. It’s a showcase for the ephemeral surface nature of the photographic, the chemical and the elemental decay mirroring the devastation of the tsunami on the coastal communities most affected.
What remains
With Less Américains, Henner sought a similar combination in his mixing of old and new. “I asked myself, ‘Can I make new images from the old?’ It became apparent that I could. I was looking at the pictures with a magnifying glass; looking for elements to erase, and looking for things to leave in. And as I did so I discovered the patterns, the repeated shapes that hold the book together; there are so many circles, grids and diagonals. Then there are the hats and the hairstyles.
“So the first action was to appropriate the book, the second was to erase it, and the third action was to produce something with different layers. Making the book took several months because of the complexity of the different layers. Conceptually you start with the erasing, then you meditate on the implications of what it means. For me if this meditation happens when I’m working on something, I know that there is something interesting going on. With Less Américains there are layers relating to authorship, how the images embed themselves in our memory, the idea of memory loss, the fading idea of a certain type of photography, and the echo of the fact that Frank destroyed his own prints.”
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Paravent © Mishka Henner.
By looking at a classic photobook, Henner is slowing down and questioning how we really see pictures, why we remember them, how they become iconic. These are questions that have never really had satisfactory answers, but ones that are being addressed more fully in both the scientific and art worlds. As we are overwhelmed with the images that we produce, consume and digest with barely a moment’s pause, so there is a corresponding deceleration and reflection on how we really see and remember pictures.
One example of this is the research being done by Aude Oliva of MIT. She is looking at what makes a memorable image (people and silhouettes of people rate highly), and is developing an app to determine the most memorable picture to help people with their editing. Also related to this is facial recognition work, which finds that the upper face is more memorable than the lower face, and that we remember heads better than faces (the face being the eyes, nose and mouth and the head being the outline of the face and head), is the finding that there is a cross-race effect where we remember our own ethnic groups better than others, and that pose affects memorability. This research finds an echo in work such as Ken Ohara’s One, a collection of portraits first published in 1970 where you see only the face (with the head cropped out); an unnerving effect that renders everybody alike, and so emphasises our sameness rather than our difference.
When Henner messes with Robert Frank’s Les Américains, he is also touching on these ideas of what we see, what we recognise, what we remember and why.
New dawn
The fact that Less Américains is published as an on-demand Blurb book also ties in to Henner’s willingness to tread new ground. And though it’s a strategy that might appal book snobs, print-on-demand makes it possible for Henner to publish his work with virtually no up-front costs. This publishing strategy (and the pricing that goes with it – Less Américains costs £80) might not get his books sold in large numbers, but it does get his work distributed and seen by potentially huge numbers.
No-Man’s Land and Astronomical reached wide audiences outside photography, but I’m not sure that Less Américains will have the same success. But perhaps that doesn’t matter. With Less Américains, Henner is slowing us down, he is making us look more carefully at the photograph and the book, making us think about what matters and what doesn’t. More than a proclamation of a new kind of photography, it is a Slow Photography that reinvigorates the form, one that uses whatever tools it can to peel back the layers of meaning in photography in quite a concrete interrogation to understand what is really happening. It’s forensic, in other words, and if it is a proclamation, it is a Churchillian proclamation that far from being over, photography has barely begun. The only thing that is ending is the beginning of photography. A new dawn beckons.
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Less Américains, Mishka Henner's remake of Robert Frank's classic photobook, takes the first French edition, published by Robert Delpire in 1958, as the inspiration for the covers and title page, while the sequencing of the inside pages is faithful to Steidl's 50th anniversary edition, edited by Frank himself. It is available as a Blurb book, priced £80 plus shipping, direct from the artist. Visit mishka.lockandhenner.com.


Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/feature/2162663/-mishka-henners-robert-franks-classic#ixzz1yKHKAyso
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