As promised!

Happy New Year everyone! Three blog posts coming up this week - just some work that I did before Christmas, starting with the following review of Sophie Calle's The Address Book for photo-eye magazine. Then I PROMISE some new, original content is coming..

‘I found an address book on the Rue des Martyrs. I decided to photocopy the contents before sending it back anonymously to its owner, whose address is inscribed on the endpaper. I will contact the people whose names are noted down… Thus, I will get to know this man through his friends and acquaintances.’ Sophie Calle

It is not often that one can honestly describe a photobook as ‘a page-turner’, however beautiful or well-designed it might be. Yet I found myself taking this small, modest volume out on the tube - snatching the opportunity to read another entry - or picking it up in the middle of reading another book, to find out what might next be revealed about film-maker ‘Pierre D’, the unsuspecting subject of Calle’s controversial investigation.

The Address Book is structured in a particularly appealing way; the bite-sized, journalistic, yet periodically lyrical, texts here were originally published as a daily column in French newspaper Libération, appearing from 23 August – 4 September 1983, and retain their snappy, anecdotal appeal even in translation. These short, diaristic entries are digestible and fascinating in themselves, but it is their relationship with the images in the book that is the most engaging part of the work. For the most part, these are black-and-white photographs of street scenes, rooms, objects and, very occasionally, people – uncaptioned and unattributed. The single exception is a colour reproduction of Paul Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1909), which, it is revealed on the following page, relates to a postcard sent by Pierre to a friend in Paris (‘What a masterpiece. See you soon, Pierre.’) Characteristically, the image and text are not placed in such emphatically close relation that you can shirk or avoid inspecting the image closely when it first appears.

This image is, however, exceptional in that it relates so directly and explicably to Calle’s text and her encounters with various of Pierre’s acquaintances. For the most part, images bear only fleeting thematic relevance to the text – an unanswered phone hangs next to two empty chairs in a neglected hallway, opposite text that documents Calle’s early, failed attempts to contact her sources - or their status is complicated, their authenticity and relevance made uncertain. Documents that Calle refers to in her account of Pierre D., such as a letter of resignation she has supposedly sourced, are not illustrated. Other, more fleeting moments – a woman relates how Pierre D. laughed as she fell and dropped a shoe - are (in this case, by a film-still-like close-up of a woman’s feet in white shoes). Such an image is a kind of ‘fictional’ counterpart to a remembered event and casts doubt, or at least a shadow of it, back into the written account as a result, so that ‘fictionality’ becomes part of the character of the text in a manner reminiscent of W.G. Sebald’s use of photography in cultural memoirs such as Rings of Saturn.

This troubling, fictionalizing approach to a real individual and, at least from one point of view, a very real intrusion onto their privacy, contributes to a guilty sense that one should not, perhaps, be reading Calle’s book at all. Indeed, there is a reason that this book is only now appearing, 30 years after the work’s original, and infamous, appearance, in an English edition – once Pierre D. was aware of Calle’s column he threatened to sue Libération and relented only when the paper had published nude photographs of Calle as a kind of (questionable) counterpart to her own project. However, it is a game with which the artist is familiar – one of her best-known works, The Hotel (1981), consists of photographs taken of hotel rooms and their intimate contents whilst employed as a chambermaid – and in which she is adept. She encourages the reader’s curiosity, even invites you to enjoy the voyeuristic thrill of peeling back layer after layer of Pierre D.’s life. The intelligent design of The Address Book not only approximates its namesake and original – ‘a 12 x 15cm bound book… has a red cover with a black spine’ – but has the secondary function of enhancing your uncertainty, perhaps even your embarrassment, at reading such a personal exercise, by referencing the anonymity of erotic novels and magazines. The twist, of course, is that you learn very little of Pierre D. in the book, beyond (often conflicting) memories, fragmentary anecdotes and references to ‘character’ and appearance.

This is why, in the end, it makes sense to review The Address Book as a photobook specifically, instead of a conceptual artwork or simply an artist’s book. This is not a lavishly illustrated volume of technically accomplished photography, nor is it strictly a work of photo-documentary, constructing a narrative out of sequencing or clever compositional effect. Calle herself has been frank about her relationship to photography - she doesn’t always take her own photographs – and critics including Yves Alain-Bois have commented on the apparent inadequacy of the results, ‘you can expect no revelation’.  However, this book could not function without its photographic backbone – the mysterious, expressive images Calle uses and the interrogation of subjectivity and authenticity they make explicit.

This review was originally published in photo-eye magazine, 10th December 2012, and can be viewed in its original form here. All photographs are by Sophie Calle from The Address Book. Published by Siglio, 2012.

A taste of things to come..

Just a quick post, to celebrate the arrival at PLATE manors this week of some lovely photobooks!

In case you can't make these out (blame the shoddy iPad 2 camera, and me, in that order), they are, from top to bottom:

Sophie Calle, The Address Book (Siglio, 2012)

The Bitter Years: Edward Steichen and the Farm Security Administration Photographs (d.a.p., 2012)

Andrew Phelps, Haboob (Kehrer Verlag, 2012)

I'm going to be reviewing these for Photo-eye magazine over the coming months, so do keep an eye on their website if you're interested! All reviews end up on PLATE as well, but I don't like to post them here until quite a while after they've appeared on Photo-eye, so check there first..

p.s. GO USA!! OBAMA FOREVER!!

Well, hello!

And apologies for the scandalous lack of posts in recent months - a mix of day-job trauma and general uselessness has prevented me posting on not only a glut of excellent photography shows in London, but also a fantastic trip to Tokyo (where I discovered the completely wonderful, if slightly airport-lounge-reminiscent Metropolitan Museum of Photography) and some fantastic photography books that have come my way.

I intend to make amends, starting with this post - it's an article/ review I wrote for 'Hotshoe' magazine earlier this year on the subject of dog photography.. More, less dog-related, news to follow very soon!

Your first instinct on seeing Martin Usborne’s series The Silence of Dogs In Cars might be to laugh. In my case, this is in no small part due to the cognitive echo of William Wegman’s immortal segments on the childrens programme Sesame Street, in which Wegman’s Weimaraner companion, Man Ray, would be enrolled to demonstrate some domestic task such as making bread or (doubtless, when the photographer was feeling “basic”) simply choosing the object that was “not like the other ones”.
This personal (and slightly fatuous) qualm aside, there is the more taxing problem for Usborne that the incongruity of seeing dogs, or indeed any animal, in “human” positions, contexts and scales is now firmly the province of internet-based, viral humour and has a comedic effect for most viewers. Add to this the problem that the dog’s face in repose tends towards the melancholy… and there is a risk that the photographer’s more serious stated aims will be overwhelmed completely by the sense that these shots are just a bit silly.

Usborne acknowledges the comedic potential of this work and says he has no problem with this response – indeed he has contributed droll commentary on this work to the Guardian and The Independent websites, remarking on the hours spent “matching the expression of the dog to the type and colour of the car”. However, he does have wider themes in mind. The premise of the project is briefly this: Usborne has carefully staged and photographed scenes of dogs trapped inside cars of various ages and makes, each of them positioned and framed slightly differently – many appear to stand in artificially-lit urban environments, other cars are shot in cluttered garages or off-road, in rural settings. This is not, as a brief description might lead you to believe, a documentary project, but rather something “more dreamlike and cinematic’” that sits (albeit strangely) amidst the work of other photographic metteurs-en-scene such as Gregory Crewdson and Philip Lorca di Corcia. Usborne professes a lifelong interest in dogs, their “mute” vulnerability. This he connects with his own fears of being alone and voiceless, and claims that, in his photographs, the dogs are a metaphor for the “raw and dare I say it – animal – parts of ourselves” that we conceal.

It is certainly easy to intuit these concerns in Usborne’s images, many of which communicate the sense of being still – stopped, stalled – through their clear, graphic compositions and intense saturation, and which subtly convey the “muted”, fearful atmosphere Usborne describes. His attention to reflective surfaces, glass and steel, and to the dynamic framing of car windows within his own photographic “window” heighten an almost auditory sense of isolation – the particular atmosphere that a closed car has. This attention to what it “feels” like to be a living thing inside a closed, mechanical body triggers a metaphorical reading of the images, in which the dogs become our “raw” animal interior life, contrasted with the body- or skull-like shell of each car – a reading aided by the fact that no humans or other creatures appear in these images to distract us from their central conceit.

One odd thing about Dogs in Cars, within the lineage of “dog photography”, is this kind of simple, direct attention to the animal subject. Elliot Erwitt’s perennially popular dog photos, for example,  incorporate architecture, props and human anatomy alongside their canine subjects (it has been remarked before that dogs were of particular use to Erwitt on advertising jobs, being perfectly placed to draw attention to shoes). Indeed, these are hardly shots of dogs at all in one sense – the animals act as props or foils to their human counterparts, alluding to their lifestyles and personalities. The same can be said of Wegman’s photography and of the dogs collected in Barnaby Conrad’s book Les Chiens de Paris – it is the mirroring or comparison of human-dog behaviour that is often the point of interest or humour in this kind of photography.


Usborne has dealt with these ideas in a recent documentary project, titled CRUFTS: Extraordinary dogs, ordinary people (2012), in which he explicitly addresses a culture where animals are used as a canvas for the quirks of taste and outlandish impulses of their, otherwise ordinary, owners – one fantastic image shows a woman whose presence is obscured by that of the spindly, cock-eared whippets crowded round her feet. Ironically, as Usborne’s title suggests, the dogs in these photos are often more convincing and engaging than their owners, the real subject of the photographs being human “obsession with classification, management  and controlling”, as expressed in breeding and grooming pedigree dogs. This is the theme – that of power and control - that carries over into Dogs in Cars, occasionally heavy-handedly, as when the stately “Prince” is photographed behind the word “slave” printed on a truck window.

 

The photographer can be disappointing when he repeats his central visual tropes too emphatically, the baleful eyes and large looming shadows of these moody, mysterious images too ponderously spelling out their emotive “themes” of constraint and abandonment . Conversely, he is at his best when he finds tension in his theme – the jolt that comes from a (rare) blurred shot of one dog baring teeth behind glass, or the wry humour of seeing a huge animal seemingly pressed up against the windscreen in a car that seems too small to contain it.

The series is varied and will undoubtedly find a varied audience – those who appreciate Usborne’s eye for colour and form, as well as those who simply appreciate dogs. Dogs in Cars has certainly found interest in the media, and among a wider public – German publishing house Kehrer Verlag will print the photographs as a fine-art photobook in a limited run of 1500 copies this Autumn, funded in part by Usborne’s campaign on website Kickstarter. The project overshot its fund-raising target of $15000 dramatically, with a total of £31,392 raised at the time of writing and, one presumes, at least a handful of sponsors who paid the $2700 dollars requisite to receive a signed photobook, postcards and full-sized gallery print in return. Whether this translates into a wider success really depends on where your tastes lie in relation to this kind of anthropomorphizing imagery – put simply, are you a dog person?

This review was originally published in Hotshoe magazine, August-September 2012, and can also be viewed in their iPad app! All (terrible) photographs of the layouts are mine and do not reflect the excellent quality of the publication..

The Mark of Abel, Lydia Panas

I first saw Lydia Panas' work from the Mark of Abel series when it was exhibited at Foley Gallery, New York, in early 2010. Back then, I remember thinking that the photographs – muted group portraits, in which obscurely connected individuals stand before anonymous rural backdrops – were engaging but hard to access. Each photograph is simultaneously a tempting puzzle, its subtle visual clues inviting you to 'work it out,' and a rebuke, resisting your attempts to draw any conclusion about its subject. Whether that discomforting effect is an intentional experiment with formal tension or, rather, a weakness in Panas' project, remains unresolved in this book.

'Group portrait' is an awkward description of what Panas does. The phrase suggests a formality, a sense of occasion, which these images are conspicuously lacking. A sense of 'inbetween-ness' is generated by the almost listless attitude in which the photographer captures her subjects. These figures rarely engage directly, physically, with the viewer or, in any dynamic way, with the frame of the photographs, though we are subjected in nearly every image to their blank yet unrelenting gazes. They 'do' almost nothing and the result is an air of expectancy, a sense of pause. George Slade puts it neatly, in his short text towards the end of the book, when he refers to the way in which these loose compositions of figures and ground create a 'dwelling within the photographic frame,' a space in which we think about and around the people depicted.

This delicate sense of presence is offset by occasional moments of explicit drama or theatricality, as in an image in which a young woman wears a white wedding dress – its slightly odd fit and her almost mournful expression informing us that she is only playing at the role of bride, and that half-heartedly. The visual reference to the commercial photography of 'occasion' underlines Panas ambivalent relationship with physical appearance – it gives us, she seems to say, everything and nothing; clues to human behaviour and character without any real or accurate understanding.

There is action of a subtle, gestural kind in Panas' photographs. At her best, she has a technical mastery and sense of visual space that activates the reader's imagination and invites interrogation of her images. In The Mark of Abel where family groups are depicted (without captions or explanatory text) this is particularly acute – what can we glean about these people and their relationships? How are they similar and how different? We wonder about the character of the woman who adjusts her partner's hair in the background of one photograph, while the 'daughter' figures in the foreground address the camera both more frankly and yet, because of their more plain and androgynous appearance, more anonymously. A slight sharpening of focus brings one woman into relief while her male companion drops back into the image, raising a protective, or self-conscious, hand to his chest. Is he unsure of the camera or disdainful of it? In this respect, in these telling gestures, The Mark of Abel has something in common with the cryptic communications of Thomas Struth's Family series, though it is less varied in scope.

When I last saw Panas work in an exhibition, it was the piece Kitty, Christine and Kira, selected for Foto8 Summershow at the Host Gallery, London. The sense of transience this later portrait evokes is heightened by the way in which the photographer has caught her beautiful subjects at odds posturally with themselves and each other. It seems more resolved than some of the work in The Mark of Abel – I look forward to seeing further Panas books in print, which are slightly less opaque, slightly less of a puzzle, than this one.

This review was originally published in photo-eye Magazine, 12th February 2011, and can be viewed in its original form here. All photographs are from The Mark of Abel, by Lydia Panas, published by Kehrer Verlag, 2012.