The Dissolving Man
Greg Neville, Close Up-Gary Cooper, 2012
A new project I’m working on is from the videos I projected in my Masters exhibition. Short close up shots from various movies were projected in low motion, to savour the subtle changes of expression and flickering thoughts that actors convey. The new work is a series of individual frames taken from those close up sequences. The moving pictures have become still, and you can study each expression, isolation from time.
The Masters project was an attempt to combine masculinity and entropy, presenting images of male faces expressing doubt and disollution (the video project was called The Dissolving Man).
When good actors perform close ups it can be very moving, a wonderful insight into human emotion. Gary Cooper was known in Hollywood as someone who didn’t appear to be doing anything at all when you saw him on set, but revealed great skill and expression when the same performance was seen on the big screen. It’s about micro-expressions, internalising and thinking the emotion.
To see what I’m talking about, click on the image for a closer view.
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Tags: actors and emotion, actors internalising emotion, close up of actor, Gary Cooper close up, Greg Neville Masters, The Dissolving Man
Noise Confluence
Greg Neville, Noise 1 at A Space gallery
The new staff exhibition at NMIT Visual Arts is called Confluence, and it’s running at the A Space Gallery at Preston campus. My new project Noise had a trial run with this image and the Blurb book, and it looks like it will work out when I expand it with more images.
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Tags: A Space gallery, Confluence exhibition, Greg Neville Noise, Noise project
My January shoot
Images from my first ever fashion shoot, for January Biannual magazine.
The inspiration was a post-apocalypse movie called Le Dernier Combat (The Last Battle), Luc Besson’s first film. Survivors dressed in makeshift costumes fight it out amongst the ruins. The ingenuity of the clothes inspired Pouline Töpfer’s combinations of designer fashion and improvised materials.
Although the photographs look simple and improvised, it took seven of us, plus the two models, to complete the project. We shot it at manysquaremetres, a large warehouse space in Kensington.
The experience of shooting fashion is one of dealing with other creative people who have their own ideas and needs: designers, dressers, models, hair & makeup artist, assistants. The location itself is another player, and so is the light. In a long day, time is short and every one works hard.
I’ve always thought of fashion photography as the most creative of the commercial genres: artists working with other artists. The unrestrained aestheticism of fashion, the pursuit of beauty in whatever form, seems a noble human endeavour to me, despite all the waste, exploitation and superficiality. Body decoration must be the oldest form of creativity, and it’s not going away any time soon.
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Tags: January Biannual, Le Dernier Combat, Luc Besson first movie, many square metres studio, manysquaremetres, Pouline Töpfer, studio in Kensington
January Biannual
January Biannual is a new fashion and style magazine and its second edition contains my first effort at fashion photography.
January contains articles about fashion, art, design and photography and its printing and presentation is to a high standard. The shoot was done last year with a team that included fashion designer (and magazine editor) Pouline Töpfer, and art director Olivia Nicholas.
My copy of January is from Metropolis bookshop, and it’s also sold through Readings, Magnation and other stores.
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Tags: January Biannual, January magazine, Magnation, Metropolis bookshop, Olivia Nicholas, Pouline Toepfler, Readings
The Minimalist still life
Laura Letinsky, Untitled 1, Fall 2009
Preparing lecture on the still life, I’ve rediscovered the work of Laura Letinsky. She is a Canadian artist who makes finely composed still lifes inspired by domestic disorder. White table clothes and white walls provide a pristine stage for her assemblies of fruit, plates, leftovers and food stains. The arrangements are made with great precision – note the contrast of tension/relaxation in the placement below. Fruit and bottle are teetering on the edge, with casual emptiness behind. At the same time, it is plausibly seen as just the natural disorder of any home. It’s a tightrope.
Over time, Letinsky has minimized the ingredients and colour palette to just white with accents of colour. She works in 10×8, which probably explains the tilting planes, depth-of-field and subtlety of colour and texture.
A good archive of her images can be seen one of her German galleries, Galerie m Bochum, and there’s a video interview with her on Vimeo.
Laura Letinsky, Untitled #43, 2001
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Tags: Canadian photographer, Galerie m Buchum, Laura Letinsky, minimalist photography, minimalist still life, still life photography, tabletop photographs
Noise
I’ve made a new Blurb book, called Noise. It’s photographs of faces from a TV screen. Because of poor reception on the TV, the images have distorted in interesting ways, faces of actors and celebrities have disintegrated in beautiful but disturbing patterns. You can see a preview of it the Blurb website.
This is the blurb I’ve written in Blurb:
Signal-to-Noise ratio is a measure of how much information is transmitted in an electronic communication compared to the random data caused by interference.
The faces in this book were photographed from a television with poor reception. The noise caused by some unknown disturbance ruptured and fragmented the intended signal – the faces of celebrities, sports heroes and fictional characters on daytime television.
In this decay of communication, new and unintended messages are discovered. The broken images on the screen create a disturbed alternative world of disintegrating faces and troubled encounters. The disordered electronic signals suggest other disorders: the images in NOISE show psychological disintegration amid the wasteland of commercial broadcasting.
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Tags: blurb.com, entropy art, faces disrupted by noise, Greg Neville Noise, interference imagery, Signal-to-noise art
Porter and Shore
Louis Porter, from Unknown Land, 2010
Is there something familiar to you about this image of dreary suburban corner? It was taken by the brilliant Melbourne photographer Louis Porter who has a line in wry visual humour of a uniquely Australian kind. He focusses on the banal corners of everyday life but injects them with wit and sophistication.
Porter’s image is a take on Stephen Shore’s great photograph of a street corner in Texas. That image (below) was part of the currency of the postmodern debates of the 1980s about Culture and Nature (remember Baudrillard?). Clearly, nature was losing.
That lonely, neutered tree was an echo of the lonely, neutered man on the corner, his slumped shoulders denoting the exhaustion of the western male hero that the location – El Paso – evoked.
Porter’s image even lacks the tree, replaced by a garbage bin, or by the traffic sign. The resigned body language is the same though, the shambolic figure is at one with the landscape of suburbia.
Stephen Shore, El Paso Street, El Paso, Texas, July 5, 1975
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Tags: Australian suburbia, image of man on street, images of Melbourne suburbs, Louis Porter, Louis Porter Unknown Land, Stephen Shore El Paso Street, Stephen Shore.
The Fatal Dream
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Greg Neville, The Fatal Dream, 2012
My new project has just gone up in a group show at 69 Smith Street Gallery in Fitzroy. The show is called Bound by the Book and I’m sharing the space with four of my talented former students in Photo Media at NMIT: Bernadette Boundy, Sue Lock, Sally D’Orsogna and Margot Sharman. The theme is the book in its various roles, as aesthetic object, as entertainment and as container of memory.
The work I’ve produced is taken from an 1845 edition of Boccaccio, the 14th century writer, so it’s doubly distanced in time. The book is intact but badly foxed, making beautiful patterns of decay through which the engravings can be just seen. My images are scans of the backs of these illustrations.
The Fatal Dream is the title of the last illustration, the reclining figure of a man. It seems a poetic description of our own lives, that we live in a dream from which we do not wake.
Both the book and the stories are ancient and the images convey that sense of time receding far back into the mist, with the voices from other lives growing dimmer. Since a book is a container of stories and characters, it resembles a human life, which itself has a beginning and an end. After that end, the memory of a life fades away, like the pages in this book.
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Tags: 69 Smith Street Gallery, Bernadette Boundy, Boccaccio book, book art, Bound by the Book, edition of the Decameron, Greg Neville work, Margot Sharman, Sally D'Orsogna, Sue Lock, the book aas art, The Fatal Dream
The real Cindy Sherman
Abe Frajndlich, portrait of Cindy Sherman, 1987
There are so many portraits of Cindy Sherman they are almost a genre of their own. A number of very good photographers have looked at her face to see what’s behind the many disguises she has worn over the past 37 years. She has not hidden away from them.
Sherman is blessed with a mild and pleasant face that has no striking characteristics. What a stroke of luck for her that her ‘instrument’ matches so well the task she has set it – to carry hundreds of other identities. A more distinctive face would have made this impossible. It’s probably unique in contemporary art that a major artist has used her own face for a life’s work in this way – only screen actors come close.
But do these portraits reveal anything? Sherman has said that when looking at her proofs, she is searching for the shot that is not her, where the identity portrayed is the fictional subject she is trying to create. In her artworks she acts out identities, it’s not just makeup and costume. She creates those characters from the inside. Look again at these portraits. Don’t they have a guileless quality? There is no performance in them as there so often is in portraits, but even in snapshots. It’s as though the years of externalizing her inner characters have drained the vanity from her and she can present herself to the camera as herself.
Robert Mappplethorpe, portrait of Cindy Sherman, 1985
Neil Winokur, portrait of Cindy Sherman, 1985
Martin Schoeller, portrait of Cindy Sherman, 2000
Mario Sorrenti, portrait of Cindy Sherman, no date
Chuck Close, portrait of Cindy Sherman, 2006, Jacquard tapestry from original Daguerrotype
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Tags: Abe Frajndlich Cindy Sherman, Chuck Close Cindy Sherman, Mario Sorrenti Cindy Sherman, Martin Schoeller Cindy Sherman, Neil Winokur Cindy Sherman, portraits of Cindy Sherman, Robert Mappplethorpe Cindy Sherman
Sherman show
Annie Liebovitz, portrait of Cindy Sherman
When Cindy Sherman was starting out in the 1970s she worked on the front desk at Artists Space gallery in New York. She would appear dressed up in costume from her shoots. The fact that she would sometimes show up for work dressed as, say, a nurse, or in a pinkish suit à la Jackie Kennedy, but frumpier, with cat-eye glasses on, is now part of art-world lore.
This portrait of Sherman in her Lower Manhattan studio is by Annie Liebovitz. The curious over exposure seems to play on Sherman’s invisibility behind the masks of her staged characters. Since she has always photographed herself the question of the real Cindy Sherman has been an issue. Liebovitz once portrayed her in Vanity Fair surrounded by lookalikes – see below. She even describes people being disappointed when meeting her since she is so mild-mannered compared to her extremist characters.
Sherman has a retrospective at MoMA this year and Vanity Fair online has a background article about it.
Annie Liebovitz, portrait of Cindy Sherman 1992
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Tags: Annie Liebovitz portrait Cindy Sherman, Cindy Sherman at Artists Space, Cindy Sherman retrospective, early Cindy Sherman, Vanity Fair online, Vanity Fair Sherman article
Sander’s man in the street
August Sander, portrait of Anton Räderscheidt, 1927
The NGV‘s recent Mad Square exhibition of Weimar art included the August Sander photograph above. It is a portrait of the painter Anton Räderscheidt, photographed on the Bismarckstrasse in Cologne. Shot at six in the morning when the street was empty of people, Räderscheidt is dressed in his usual attire, looking like a figure from one of his own paintings. In the 1920s and 30s, Räderscheidt painted in the New Objectivity mode, shading off into Magic Realism: bowler-hatted figures encounter modern buildings, and naked women, in airless streetscapes.
The photograph has always seemed strangely blunt to me – the subject faces the camera without guile or grace, like a court exhibit. There is something about the legs which reinforces the object-quality of the figure, as though he is a thing rather than a person. Two variant images have surfaced, one shows the subject in a more relaxed pose, and another where he stands amid horse droppings – well it was the Weimar period.
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August Sander, portraits of Anton Räderscheidt, 1927, variants
Räderscheidt had a long career as a painter. Successful in the Weimar period, he became an official Degenerate artist in the Nazi period and left Germany, but he survived into old age with some renown. His paintings, which can be seen at www.raederscheidt.com, showed solitary figures in empty, alien streets, just like Sander’s photograph.
Anton Räderscheidt, Man in front of a yellow house 1923 (destroyed during WWII)
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Tags: Anton Räderscheidt, August Sander, Bismarckstrasse Cologne, men's fashion 1920s, New Objectivity painters, portrait of Anton Räderscheidt, Räderscheidt Degenerate art, Räderscheidt Entartete Kunst, Räderscheidt Magic Realism
Koenning’s Lacunae
Katrin Koenning, Lacuna 00
Melbourne’s new photography gallery, Edmund Pearce (Edmund who?) has had a group show that included the work of Katrin Koenning, an emigré German photographer who lives in the city. Her work can be viewed on her excellent website www.katrinkoenning.com. The images may remind you of Lorca diCorcia‘s urban photos, I can’t argue with that, although he in turn might have have once been compared to Harry Callahan who also shot in big city canyons.
Koenning has found a Melbourne city street where light penetrates only briefly during the day like a spotlight. Passers by are caught like actors on a stage, and Koenning’s long lens draws out the drama with great precision. The image below looks like a stage version of Dante’s Inferno.
Katrin Koenning, Lacuna 06
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Tags: Dante's Inferno, Edmund Pearce, Harry Callahan street photographs, Katrin Koenning, Koenning's Lacuna, Lorca diCorcia street photos, Melbourne light, Melbourne street photography, photographs of Melbourne streets, photos of people on the street, woman in red dress
Toledano’s faces
Phillip Toledano, from Gamers, 2003
Phillip Toledano is an enterprising photographer from the U.S. I recently posted about his satirical project America, the Gift Shop.
The startling image above is from a series on emotion and facial expression. It looks like someone inflicting pain, or receiving it. Could it have been shot in a gym, where pain is the currency? Or perhaps an acting class, with students performing scenes of violence? These are all good ideas and I should follow them up with my camera, since I’m interested in representations of the face. But they are not how Toledano captured the image, one of a series of intense portraits of emotion which you can see it at www.mrtoledano.com.
“I wondered if there was a way to unconsciously tease out aspects of people’s personality, and capture it on film. So I had them play video games.”
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Tags: close up portrait, faces showing stress, Gamers, Phillip Toledano, photographs of game players, portraits of play
Vivian Maier – Street Photographer, Powerhouse Books 2011
My book on Vivian Maier’s photographs has arrived and it is a handsome thing. It does great honour to this curious and talented photographer.
Maier was an amateur street photographer in Chicago. She died in her 80s in 2009, just as her life’s work was being rescued from street markets.
It is an appealing myth. A solitary genius works on a vast oeuvre which is unseen throughout her life. It’s chance discovery rescues it from certain oblivion. The discoverer is an unknown individual who stakes his career to protect the work. The anonymous photographer dies in obscurity just before being discovered. The work is presented to the public and is instantly hailed as brilliant and significant. Who wrote this plot?
Well, it’s a familiar plot because we’ve been there before: in so many ways it’s the story of Eugene Atget in the 1920s. Berenice Abbott and Man Ray discovered Atget as a journeyman photographer in Paris, realised his importance … and then he died. They are appealing myths, even though they’re true (I think).
The person who found Maier’s work is John Maloof and he has set up a very good website to display her work and tell the story. He is behind a feature length documentary in preparation. Exhibitions of her work are travelling round the world. Any living artist would would kill for this career trajectory.
An interview with Maloof can be found at Design Observer. The book is available from www.powerhousebooks.com
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Tags: discovery of Eugene Atget, John Maloof, Maloof Design Observer, photography career, Street photographer, Vivian Maier, Vivian Maier Powerhouse Books, Vivian Maier Street Photographer
My life in cameras no.23
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The Fujifilm X100 is the classiest camera I’ve ever owned. The Age newspaper voted it their camera of the year:
“Fujifilm launched the X100 in the first half of the year to general astonishment. The concept of a fixed-lens, fixed focal length, retro-styled digital camera with dual optical/electronic viewfinder and an APS sensor as used in SLRs, is brilliant. Old codgers wept a tear of recognition and nostalgia. Not only are all the controls laid out just like a film camera of yore, there is even a screw socket for an old-fashioned cable release. At $1200, this is our camera of the year.” – Terry Lane, The Age Green Guide, 9/12/2012.
It feels as good to the hand as as it looks to the eye, a camera you want to pick up and use. The size and weight make it comfortable, buttons are handy and there are plenty of them. The new hybrid viewfinder that switches magically between optical and digital is a wonderful thing – a camera you hold to your eye rather than at arms length. The retro feel is not mere fashion, it’s good sense to design a camera the way they have existed for 80 years. PetaPixel.com has made a comparison with the Leica M3 (on the right). You can see what the designers were thinking.
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These photographs were made recently of the walls of Venice that are such a marvellous canvas for the photographer. You could spend a very long time working on just this aspect of the city. Eventually I’d get it right.
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Tags: Fujifilm X100, photos of Venice, Terry Lane The Age Green Guide, Venice walls, X100 camera
Toledano’s toy
Phillip Toledano, Abu Ghraib Bobble-head figurine, 2008
This item is atrocious isn’t it? The worst possible taste – a toy figure celebrating a photograph of torture. Its creator, Phillip Toledano, made it as part of an installation on the disasters of the Bush presidency, now thankfully behind us:
“AMERICA THE GIFT SHOP is an installation project that reflects the foreign policy of the Bush/Cheney years through the fun-house mirror of American commerce. My palette is the vernacular of retail tourism.”
It’s a satirical piece that dared to target both the presidency and our capacity to commercialize almost anything. And if you think torture could never be commercialized, just remember that Jesus Christ got similar treatment and the Church has been selling trinkets of it ever since (many of them sado-masochistic nudes!) You can see the complete installation of this project at www.americathegiftshop.com.
The original image of the Iraqi torture victim is an example of the potency of single photographs to scorch our memory – perhaps the word ‘brand’ would be more accurate. It was so deeply shocking that you can never forget it, like the shots of the Twin Towers. What is it about the phenomenology of the photograph that it burns us so deeply, in ways that paintings do not?
The figurine also is an example of photography metamorphosing into sculpture, of the 2D extruding itself into 3D. It is a curious instance of species cross-breeding, the giant sculpture of the Iwo Jima soldiers raising the flag is a further example. Normally a particular medium, photography, sculpture or painting, is distinct and the attributes of one are not found in another. But a sculpture made out of a photograph? It’s a strange and magical thing, like a fish with feathers or a chicken with gills.
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Tags: Abu Ghraib Bphoto, Abu Ghraib figurine, Abu Ghraib toy, AMERICA THE GIFT SHOP, Phillip Toledano, photo sculpture
Cinemagraph
Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg
Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg are two New York artists working in the field of fashion photography, she is a photographer, he is a digital media specialist. The combination of their talents has produced a series of startling images, fashion stills that move. They have branded this technique ‘Cinemagraph,’ cinema-photograph.
The couple create images that are conceived as still photographs but captured as video (the above image contains 35 frames). Post-production eliminates all but a few traces of recorded motion, then the file is saved using the .gif format. At least I think that’s what they do.
The Turnstyle blog interviewd them about their work: An animated .gif is usually a sequence of stills pulled from video, animated art, or other imagery that is repurposed into a .gif. What we do is different because it’s a traditional still photograph with a moment living within it.
We wanted to tell more of a story than a single still frame photograph, but didn’t want the high maintenance aspect of a video. In preparation for Fashion Week we were trying to figure out a way to show more about what it was like being there, so cinemagraphs were born out of a need to tell a story in a fast digital age.
This is a new thing in photography and you can see more of it on their sites: cinemagraphs.com and fromme-toyou.tumblr.com.
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Tags: animated .gif, animated photographs, cinema-photograph, Cinemagraph, fashion photos that move, from me to you blog, fromme-toyou blog, gif format, Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg, moving photos, photos that move
Lawrence and Freddie
When you see the film Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen you realize how great its Director of Photography Freddie Young was. He won an Oscar for it.
But I’m not just talking about Young as a cinematographer, I’m referring to the composed shots that appear on the screen as beautiful still images, as photographs.
One of the greatest single shots in cinema, the three-minute mirage sequence in which a figure slowly emerges from the desert haze, is a wonderful three part composition – see that tiny speck on the horizon in the image above? It’s a great suspenseful moment in the film, but visually it also functions as an elegant still photograph. There are many throughout the film. As well as being a great movie, Lawrence is also a great portfolio of landscape photographs.
The desert is a character in Lawrence and you often gaze at it as if at a star. The film immerses you in it, it paints the desert across the screen. There are points in the film where it is such an astonishing sight the filmmakers just leave it there on the screen so you to take it in.
This seems close to the indexical nature of still photography, its role of pointing, as if it’s saying “look at that.” You could argue that there is a distinct genre of ‘still’ photography contained within movies, images that have some DNA of the still within them and could be lifted out and printed. Despite plot, character, sound and movement there is also that purely optical component, subordinated to story but staying in the mind anyway. It must leave some residue in photographic culture.
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Tags: David Lean and freddie Young, desert movies, Freddie Young BSC, Lawrence of Arabia, Oscars for Lawrence of Arabia, photographs of deserts, photographs of the desert
The Decisive Moment
Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment, 1952. Cover, Henri Matisse
I recently had the privilege of looking through Cartier-Bresson’s 1952 book, The Decisive Moment. It sells for $2000 these days. The Decisive Moment is a legendary book, a retrospective of his photographic work that established his prestige and inserted a new phrase into photographic terminology…
“…if the shutter was pressed at the decisive moment, you have instinctively fixed a geometric pattern without which the photograph would have been both formless and lifeless.”
C-B disowned the phrase in later years but it usefully captures an important aspect of his practice. It’s about the medium’s genetic link to the subject of time and hence timing, and you can see how his timing worked in this photograph from the book, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris, 1932. Aiming his camera through a hole in a fence, he caught this little ballet, a man jumping a puddle and his reflection, corresponding shapes on the ground, a circus poster in the background which echoes it all. It’s the earliest ‘serious’ photograph I can recall seeing, at about 15, and it helped propel me into a lifetime of photography.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris, 1932
The focal point of this photograph is the man and his reflection, specifically the foot about to touch the water. More specifically, it’s that gap between the foot and its reflection, the suspense created by the absence of closure. I’ve Photoshopped the feet to eliminate the gap so the foot has touched its reflection. The tension has gone, and so has the particular thrill of this image.
“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression…”
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Tags: Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Henri Cartier-Bresson, man jumping across a puddle, man jumping puddle, The Decisive Moment
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Odds Against
Harry Callahan, Chicago 1961
When I was ‘young in photography’ this Callahan photograph made a deep impression on me. A monumental figure like a statue is plucked out of an everyday moment on a footpath. The ominous clock ticking away, its hand pointing at the woman, a de Chirico in Chicago.
What are the odds against finding its sister image made only a year or two before? The Robert Wise movie Odds Against Tomorrow was made in 1959 and has a brief shot of people walking past a bank – soon to be robbed – and a woman walking under a clock.
There is no connection between the two images, it’s just something I noticed, but curiously, the movie does have some of the fateful quality of the photograph. It’s about the racial bigotry which leads to the doom of its two main characters. A very visual film, the cinematography is so refined and beautiful it relates to Callahan’s still photography aesthetic. I did some posts on the movie which you can find at Odds Against Tomorrow 1, 2 and 3
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Tags: Harry Callahan, Harry Callahan Chicago 1961, Harry Callahan street photographs, Odds Against Tomorrow, Odds Against Tomorrow cinematography