Monday 15 December 2008

Tokihiro Sato





Tokihiro Sato uses a mirror or torch to create photographs 'Photo Respirations' that trace time through light, a counterpart to Hiroshi Sugimoto's concerns. Interesting for me, when I was researching initial ideas I was looking at signalling using mirrors and the sun, thinking 'this can't make a photograph', but from depth of exploration comes discovery....images from here

Wednesday 10 December 2008

Judging a book by its cover



This is perhaps how the front cover of the book will look, although, of course, I can't really envisage how the design will be as a physical object. Also still need to purge myself of over-ambitious expectations of both the book and the photographs it contains, thinking of it makes my stomach churn right now! Just had a hunt for, and can't currently find, a book that my grandfather made about a summer climbing trip to Skye. It is painstakingly handwritten with detailed pen and ink sketches of the routes on the mountains. A kind of Wainwright tribute, it is an intense and personal vanity project, presumably never intended for anything other than his own pride. Vanity publishing seems like a negative term but my grandfather's book is wonderful, despite or because of it its intended audience of one, or perhaps some of his climbing club friends. I've tried to bring this idea through in the way that I've presented my work in the book, and I suppose in the very notion of getting it hand-bound. The photographs are subjective experiences of light, and therefore I've presented them as a subjective book. I've also tried to bring in the relationship that printing had to the development of religion, and therefore the assimilation of ancient sun cults into Christian doctrine. Of course, most people will just think the cover is a nice colour and wonder why some of the pictures are blurry! And so they should...

Monday 8 December 2008

Festival of Light





At the Oldham Interfaith Festival of Light on Friday photographing for my day (or should that be night?) job. The evening was a celebration of light festivals in different religions, (from the top) Hindi dancers celebrating Diwali, the Christian Nativity, and Islamic Nasheed. Think I missed the Buddhist section of the programme but the pagans definitely weren't representing, despite all of the above arguably being sublimations of the solstice. Two things that I am thinking of here- firstly the different ways I could have developed my project. I've not really blogged about the book design and getting it printed and off to the binder, because, unlike childbirth there is no massive rush of hormones that instantly makes you forget the means to the end; all I can see of it at the moment is mistakes and tortured misjudgements. I could have done something very straight forward like the above; and let sequence and design ascribe meaning. I feel like I have far too much meaning with my book, like how they say a first novel always tries to bring in every experience of the writer's life to date massacring clarity in the process. Secondly, how much is easier is it to shoot digital? It takes a one hundredth of the time to get it to a point where it can be sent out into the world. I'm amongst millions having this dialogue still in my head, and there are fundamental reasons why I chose to shoot my project on film. Yet I can't help but think that I am a pretentious Luddite with this, thinking that shooting film makes me and the photograph more serious and worthy when ultimately the medium is not the message, the subject is. And to give a subject the value it deserves requires it to be disseminated as widely as possible, and to recognise that you can't control people's response to it once it is gone.

Wednesday 26 November 2008

The Somnambulist



Ralph Gibson, 'The Somnambulist'. I think the guitar stuff is kind of horrible though, like the photo equivalent of Paul McCartney's later career.

Light is like water

I read this story years ago and often think about it in relation to photography, especially at the moment trying to find words for the book which enhance it:


Light Is Like Water
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
as published in the collection of short stories 'Strange Pilgrims'


    At Christmas the boys asked again for a rowboat.

    "Okay," said their papa, "we'll buy it when we get back to Cartagena."

    Toto, who was nine years old, and Joel, who was seven, were more determined than their parents believed.

    "No," they said in chorus. "We need it here and now."

    "To begin with," said their mother, "the only navigable water here is what comes out of the shower."

    She and her husband were both right. Their house in Cartagena de Indias had a yard with a dock on the bay, and a shed that could hold two large yachts. Here in Madrid, on the other hand, they were crowded into a fifth-floor apartment at 47 Paseo de la Castellana. But in the end neither of them could refuse, because they had promised the children a rowboat complete with sextant and compass if they won their class prizes in elementary school, and they had. And so their papa bought everything and said nothing to his wife, who was more reluctant than he to pay gambling debts. It was a beautiful aluminum boat with a gold stripe at the water line.

    "The boat's in the garage," their papa announced at lunch. "The problem is, there's no way to bring it up in the elevator or by the stairs, and there's no more space available in the garage."

    On the following Saturday afternoon, however, the boys invited their classmates to help bring the boat p the stairs and they managed to carry it as far as the maid's room.

    "Congratulations," said their papa. "Now what?"

    "Now nothing," said the boys. "All we wanted was to have the boat in the room, and now it's here."

    On Wednesday night, as they did every Wednesday, the parents went to the movies. The boys, lords and masters of the house, closed the doors and windows and broke the glowing bulb in one of the living room lamps. A jet of golden light as cool as water began to pour out of the broken bulb, and they let it run to a depth of almost three feet. Then they turned off the electricity, took out the rowboat, and navigated at will among the islands in the house.

    This fabulous adventure was the result of a frivolous remark I made while taking part in a seminar on the poetry of household objects. Toto asked me why the light went on with just a touch of a switch, and I did not have the courage to think about it twice.

    "Light is like water," I answered. "You turn the tap and out it comes."

    And so they continued sailing every Wednesday night, learning how to use the sextant and the compass, until their parents came home from the movies and found them sleeping like angels on dry land. Months later, longing to go farther, they asked for complete skin-diving outfits: masks, fins, tanks, and compressed air rifles.

    "It's bad enough you've put a rowboat you can't use in the maid's room," said their father. "To make it even worse, now you want diving equipment too."

    "What if we win the Gold Gardenia Prize for the first semester?" said Joel.

    "No," said their mother in alarm. "That's enough."

    Their father reproached her for being intransigent.

    "These kids don't win so much as a nail when it comes to doing what they're supposed to," she said, "but to get what they want they're capable of taking it all, even the teacher's chair."

    In the end the parents did not say yes or no. But in July, Toto and Joel each won a Gold Gardenia and the public recognition of the headmaster. That same afternoon, without having to ask again, they found the diving outfits in their original packing in their bedroom. And so the following Wednesday, while their parents were at the movies seeing Last Tango in Paris, they filled the apartment to a depth of two fathoms, dove like tame sharks under furniture, including the beds and salvaged from the bottom of the light things that had been lost in darkness for years.

    At the end-of-the-year awards ceremony, the brothers were acclaimed as examples for the entire school and received certificates of excellence. This time they did not have to ask for anything, because their parents asked them what they wanted. They were so reasonable that all they wanted was a party at home as a treat for their classmates.

    Their papa, when he was alone with his wife, was radiant.

    "It's a proof of their maturity, "he said.

    "From your lips to God's ear," said their mother.

    The following Wednesday, while their parents were watching The Battle of Algiers, people walking along the Paseo de la Castellana saw a cascade of light falling from an old building hidden among the trees. It spilled over the balconies, poured in torrents down the facade, and rushed along the great avenue in a golden flood that lit the city all the way to the Guadarrama.

    In response to the emergency, firemen forced the door on the fifth floor and found the apartment brimming with light all the way to the ceiling. The sofa and easy chairs covered in leopard skin were floating at different levels in the living room, among the bottles from the bar and the grand piano with its Manila shawl that fluttered half submerged like a golden manta ray. Household objects, in the fullness of their poetry, flew with their own wings through the kitchen sky. The marching band instruments that the children used for dancing drifted among the bright-colored fish freed from their mother's aquarium, which were the only creatures alive and happy in the vast illuminated marsh. Everyone's toothbrush floated in the bathroom, along with Papa's condoms and Mama's jars of creams and her spare bridge, and the television set from the master bedroom floated on its side, still tuned to the final episode of the midnight movie for adults only.

    At the end of the hall, moving with the current and clutching the oars, with his mask on and only enough air to reach port, Tonto sat in the stern of the boat searching for the lighthouse, and Joel, floating in the prow, still looked for the north star with the sextant, and floating through the entire house were their thirty-seven classmates, eternalized in the moment of peeing into the pot of geraniums, singing the schools song with the words changed to make fun of the headmaster, sneaking a glass of brandy from Papa's bottle. For they had turned on so many lights at the same time that the apartment had flooded, and two entire classes at the elementary school of Saint Julian the Hospitaler drowned on the fifth floor of 47 Paseo de la Castellana. In Madrid, Spain, a remote city of burning summers and icy winds, with no ocean or river, whose land-bound indigenous population had never mastered the science of navigating on light.

Monday 24 November 2008

Suns from the Internet


I had been looking and failing to find this for a while, but finally came across Penelope Umbrico's 'Suns from the Internet' project again:-

'This is a project I started when I found 2,303,087 pictures of sunsets searching the word “sunset on the Flickr site. I took just the suns from these pictures and made snapshot prints of them.

I find it particularly absurd that the sun, the quintessential life giver, constant in our lives, symbol of enlightenment, spirituality, eternity, all things unreachable and ephemeral, omnipotent provider of optimism and vitamin D… and so ubiquitously photographed, is subsumed to the Internet, the most virtual of spaces equally infinite but within a closed electrical circuit. Looking into this cool electronic space one finds a virtual window into the natural world'

Wednesday 19 November 2008

Book Planning



Its kind of like playing pairs with cards, only better....

Red Eye



My optician told me that I had too many red blood cells in my eyes yesterday. Its difficult to explain the desire to stare at magnified dust on a computer screen solidly for a week even to myself at this stage. I'm longing for straight forward sensor dust right now.

Wednesday 12 November 2008

The Nuremberg Chronicle






The first photograph is from a copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle held at Chetham's Library, actually photographed at the window seat where Marx and Engels used to meet up, and that's the shadow of the window of the oldest medieval settlement in the North of England over it, that is! The Nuremberg Chronicle is one of the oldest printed books, an incunabulum. (I make no apologies for using wikipedia to reference to here, although I use to bollock my students for using it as their primary essay source, as it is like the giant index in the sky- a really good place to glean the general facts of something!) This copy of the chronicle is particularly interesting as it has been bound with a handwritten translation done in Warrington, in the North of England. I, like many in England, assumed that Warrington had been invented as a place at some point in the late eighties as its primary topographical feature are roundabouts and Ikea, and there used to be this advert trying to persuade people that it was a sensible place to house a business in (I think) with this guy with a Chinese accent going 'Warrrington- Runcorn, its the heart of the nation!

I digress, but it astonishing to learn that Warrington was an ancient seat of learning and almost had one of the first universities in the world. This early Renaissance period has become increasingly important to my understanding of the photographs I took at Saint-Sulpice on the day of the Equinox. The time was such a mash up of superstition colliding with organised religion, and the Catholic Church subsuming pagan beliefs. This is evident, for instance, in the very architecture of Saint-Sulpice, the second image (both of these quoted in 'Discovering the Vernacular Landscape' by John Brinckerhoff):-

'There is very little doubt that during the entire Middle Ages there existed the belief in a distinct relationship between stone and stars'

Peter Fingesten, The Eclipse of Symbolism


'Today when the original treatment of stone has disappeared, we are only occasionally aware of it, chiefly there where old stained glass windows still gleam and where their light transforms the stone. We should think of the Cathedral not only in terms of colour, but as being suffused with the atmosphere of light….the building should ‘shine’, ‘sparkle’, ‘glitter’, ‘dazzle’…it would however be false to say that the Cathedral denies its stone character. It keeps it throughout, only it idealizes it by giving it a gem like, transfigured, vibrant, crystalline aspect'

Hans Sedlmayr, Die Enstehung der Kathedrale

.

The role of printing in the shift of understanding during this time is, of course, immense, and this particular copy of the book seems to me, to beautifully represent the transition.

Tuesday 11 November 2008

David Alan Harvey


© David Alan Harvey

Some of the posts on David Alan Harvey's Work In Progress detail his process when putting a book together, or rather the many different ways of putting a book together:

'well, the first thing is the idea or the concept...this is the hardest part (and where i am now on this one)....the second thing, is the actual shooting....this is the hardest part...and the third thing is editing your work down to something that works...this is the hardest part....and the fourth thing is the securing of a publisher and the control over the layout....this is the hardest part.....and the fifth thing is the distribution, the creating of exhibitions and the pr "selling" of the book...this is the hardest part (because by this time you are totally tired of these pictures and are moving on to something else)...'

Tuesday 4 November 2008

Tanning Salons


© Caroline Edge

I’ve been hanging out in tanning salons lately; in fact I even went on a sun bed the other day, all in the name of research, of course. Trying to create a contrast to the more ‘spiritual’ photographs that I have taken at the eclipse, solstice etc. However the sun bed photos have a spiritual atmosphere all of their own, if I don’t sound a wanker saying this about my own work. This is because of the light; the eerie glow of the blue, the unusual effect by having this enveloping light source, and the shorter wave length of UV. Mostly though the pictures remind me of mortuary slabs in TV police procedural dramas. The light makes the body seem lifeless. Being on the beds is akin to being slowly roasted in an industrial cooker. Surprisingly hot and really claustrophobic. I only managed about two and a half minutes but now I feel really good for having a dose of sunshine- so begins the slippery slope! By January I’ll probably have full scale tanorexia. My beloved, being a man, insisted on going on for twice the recommended time and now has sun burn. I feel a bit guilty, for me the whole idea of going on a sun bed seems wildly exotic and massively irresponsible, yet for masses of people, particularly in the North of Britain this is normal. The list of tanning salons in Manchester extends into the hundreds. The owner of the salon showed me older beds which were more powerful and looked even more 80’s factory. Apparently people travel from the other side of Manchester for the sake of this additional radiation. I only they took Melanotan II instead, after they got over being violently sick from the injections, they could be horny as well as brown! There’s nowt as queer as folks…..

Tuesday 28 October 2008

Incline Press





I'm lucky to have guidance on putting a book together which matches the research potential of Chetham's Library in the Oldham based Incline Press. I went to meet Graham Moss, the founder of the press yesterday, another time warp. Seems I shall probably be having a round binding so that the book will open flat and double spreads can be put in as inserts to avoid the problems of having two halves on an image misregistered. Also can get a title page beautifully handset. Yet to decide quite how the cover will be, but I know that I'm getting great advice as you can see if you check out the output of the press: some examples above and more information, including how to buy the books, at absurdly low prices for their beauty on the website.

Is there a ghost in my house?



Slightly off topic but a long standing personal interest. The upper half of a man's body manifesting in my front room! The magic of sunlight..

Thursday 23 October 2008

A Shepherd's Calendar







Visited Chetham’s Library last week to look at some of their collection for two reasons. Firstly to look at sun symbols, but also to get design inspiration. I’d like to have a (subtle) reference to the early Renaissance going on in the design to echo the concepts going on in the photographs. As I write this I realise that it is the first time I’ve articulated this particular understanding of the project- early renaissance being the point where superstition hit reason…. Anyway I don’t want to produce a school history project to recreate the Magna Carta, all burnt page edges and staining with coffee: rather to take some influences like binding, type and proportion in to a modern design. I’m lucky that I’ve some great resources nearby for researching this sort of thing in Chetham’s Library and the John Ryland’s Library, both of which have superb collections. Visiting Chetham’s library is an adventure in itself; you go through a small door (Alice in Wonderland, Being John Malkovich) and go back in time. It is a place where the act of consulting a book is made beautiful. The images here are details from a ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’ (late 15th C) - a misleading name for a stunningly complicated book charting solar and lunar cycles and eclipses. This astronomy is then linked to astrology, in a manner abhorrent to our modern scientific understanding. It is a beautiful object but the funny thing is it seems like a really really good school history project, the sort that the kid who was amazing at drawing would do!


Monday 20 October 2008

Pieter Ten Hoopen



images © Pieter Ten Hoopen

Pieter Ten Hoopen's photography is massively atmospheric, due to his use of movement and colour. He was a winner in the World Press Photo Awards last year for his story on Kitezh 'the invisible city'. He talks about the project on the World Press website, explaining how in missing the exact time that the legendary city is supposed to rise up from the lake now standing in its place he focused instead on the neighbouring town of Vadimirskoe, also invisible in its dearth of employment and high rate of alcohol abuse. He is represented by Agence Vu which showcases a great selection of his work.

Sunday 19 October 2008

On Demand publishing

In a quandary about the best way to go about producing this book. There are so may things that can go wrong between scanning a negative and holding the book in your hands. My issue with on-line publishing is the lack of control and the lack of physicality to the process. But with self-publishing I'm not sure of the best way to actually get the photos on the paper- I worry about precise registration. Conscientious has a good collection of experiences about these issues to learn from.

The Grateful Dead



I'd like to go to Egypt to shoot but it's looking unlikely as it isn't vital to the book. So here's the Grateful Dead and The Merry Pranksters grooving at the pyramids in 78.

Thursday 16 October 2008

Sun Dog





How have I never heard of sun dogs before? Or to give them their correct name parhelions? It like when I realised that there were no adverts on the BBC at the age of twenty. Both images courtesy of wiki media commons, the second a seventeenth century copy of the Vädersolstavlan depiciting the optical phenomenon over Stockholm.

Saturday 11 October 2008

Prayers



Hans-Christian Schink



Another proponent of the black sun (see Chris McCaw, Harlan Erskine, Ansel Adams). But presumably an originator, and winner of the inaugural REAL photo award, some more information on Mrs Deane and read in the BJP last week. The photography is stunning, I love the role of the light in exaggerating the graphic of the composition. It is so difficult to avoid covering the same ground as other people- something that used to torment me as a mannered art undergraduate. As I get older I begin to think does it matter. Each of the contemporary photographers who I'm aware of has used this motif in a visually and conceptually different way: each has been successful.

Thursday 9 October 2008

Saint-Sulpice Tripych


Image © thismediathing
.com

A pleasant surprise at Saint Sulpice was the LED triptych installed by artists Jim Campbell and Benjamin Bergery, working under the name 'thismediathing'. The LED installation gives a very low light working in harmony with the church interior and the imagery relates to Biblical themes, filtered through through the reinterpretation of Renaissance representation. The faces are blurred and the content ambiguous, yet contextualised through the location. The dim light of the LEDs and the church interior emphasising the remote reverence of the work. Churches make fine galleries, as I suppose was one of their original functions... Saint Sulpice itself also housing some stunning painting by Delacroix.

Thursday 2 October 2008

Catholic Sun Worship Devil YouTube Frenzy


I find the Catholic Church's absorption of pagan beliefs and symbolism interesting, but some people are a bit more paranoid about it, or even that it is evidence that the devil won the battle between good and evil and Christianity is a trick to get us all to worship the Sun- sadly I can't locate this particular entry to the youetube canon so I'm posting a more reasoned argument...

On Sungazing

Saint Sulpice





Back from France and in a scanning marathon. Its initially depressing to see the photos and then gets better... but apart from a few instant standout shots my opinions can shift quite a lot on what will or will not be included. At the church of Saint Sulpice in Paris for the Equinox, as detailed in the occult conspiracy blockbuster the Da Vinci code (see the second picture) the church has a gnomon (see the first picture) and is in effect a giant sundial. On the equinox the sun is channeled through a hole and hits a marker on a brass line set into the floor of the church. The circumstances of the installation of the gnomon are explained without reference to CERN or mad monks in J.L. Heilbron's 'The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories.' which details how the Catholic Church came to convert four cathedrals into solar observatories during the 17th and 18th centuries, despite the church's reactionary response to scientific advances.

Due to a slight error, still a sore point, I have no picture of the light hitting the marker. It was a gloriously sunny day too! These photography missions I have been taking for my book all revolve around a chance moment of light; at Stonehenge the sun rising over the heel stone, being able to see the eclipse in Siberia after days on a train. This reflects for me the chance nature of the photograph itself- the search for the decisive moment, but through the process and looking at the resulting photos I'm getting to understand that it is about what lies around getting to that moment of chance too. The Catholic Church, and indeed all spiritual belief systems that I am aware of, make use of light, as symbol, and as atmosphere. The calendar is intrinsically linked to the sun of course, and this made its movements of vital importance to the Catholic Church, seeking to define its year of worship. The failure to get the money shot, which given the placement of the line after the church's construction, would not have been terribly interesting visually, gave me a chance to think more about how the church used light to instill reverence and glory into its rituals. Devices such as stained glass, rose windows, and candles result in this controlled cinematography of worship. The final photograph I've posted here was taken in one of the side chapels that line the church, and it was like a pool of 17th century light had been fixed in time. Also its interesting to think ultimately the church is a giant camera obscura..


Monday 15 September 2008

Smaller?



Thinking about layout, the above being rather influenced by the layout of Tony Evan's photos in English Sunrise as designed by David Hillman. The book is curiously modern in concept and presented with the attention to detail that makes viewing the book a great experience. Little things like how the pages open and the size of it in your hand. Simultaneously the book is really dated by the circular corners of the pictures, and the colour of the prints- I don't know whether the nostalgia trip was attended but it is a great lesson in design. In particular I like how the photographs are presented small, demanding an intimate viewing experience. I am working with a small format and creating book photographs as Alec Soth would have it. I want my photographs to be like icons, small and richly coloured prayers.

Sunday 14 September 2008

PhotoMNE, Lourdes



Looking greatly forward to this, especially to see Guillaume Riviere's work. It'll be interesting to return to Lourdes which has become a bit of dream-like condition in my mind. More info at the official website about the other photographers.

transparency

I love it when photographers are properly open with technique stuff like this, and don't give it all the coca- cola secret recipe tale; although truth be told i struggle to be open about process:

'AFH: What about this next photograph [Untitled, Morrissey 23]?

RM: Our nickname for this one is "the hulk" because he's all green.

AFH: How are you getting these colors?


RM: The colors are the result of film experimentation. Before I go to the concerts, I expose the film to different lights - Daylight, television light, tungsten light, sunsets, colored lights, morning light, basically all kinds of light. I expose the roll and then shoot it again at the shows. Between exposing the film and utilizing the intense stage lighting, i've got a process down to achieve new color palates.'

(from an interview with ryan mcginley on the saatchi blog)

Thursday 11 September 2008

'Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae'



Oh God and these, so bizarre and beautiful: "Angels form an arc under the central light, which is YHWH, the Hebrew letters for God. Daylight is the source of direct light, refracted light, and light reflected by night (on right). Divine authority, a hand writing a book that absorbs light directly from the source of all light, oversees the daylight, and it is a little higher than Reason, the hand writing a book above the night, which receives a more modest eye's light. Below daylight is Profane Authority, which receives only a lantern's light; below Reason is Sense, which points to an image produced by a telescope. Emperor Ferdinand enters the picture as one of Kircher's patrons."

Kircher's Magnetism





Images from Kircher's Magnetism via the amazing Bibliodyssey, the last being a remarkable machine, a sunflower clock: '"To illustrate his belief in the magnetic relationship between the sun and the vegetable kingdom, Kircher designed this heliotropic sunflower clock by attaching a sunflower to a cork and floating it in a reservoir of water. As the blossom rotated to face the sun, a pointer through its center indicated the time on the inner side of a suspended ring. Kircher claimed that it didn't work well because enclosing it in a glass case would block the sun's attractive force, and that it was 'therefore susceptible to inaccuracies due to the wind'."
I especially like the ideas, and the esotericism of the imagery: I love the pattern of the magnetic fields, and the hint of magic.... But I still can't get my head round how to bring these things into my book without distracting from the photography.

Wednesday 10 September 2008

The English Sunrise



Very potentially excited about this book, hopefully winging its way to me. 'The English Sunrise' won a Gold D&AD Award for graphic design in 1973. Photos by Tony Evans, written by Brian Rice, design David Hillman. The book seems to be a document of the sunrise motif in English vernacular design, and from what I can gather is quite minimal in its layout. It is still such a modern idea- I've mulled around on some variations of it myself-and I think that the execution of both the design and photography might reflect that.... the second image is taken from some one's site who has cut the book up and is selling it with some nice quote about sunrises stuck on the back of it, apparently you're meant to string these cards up 'like gems' as a form of home decoration- travesty!!! Well I suppose it's enjoying a book in a way...

Thursday 4 September 2008

Forests and Light





The aestheticization (is this actually a word yet?) of disaster, as my course would describe it? Christopher LaMarca's exquisite photographs from the book 'Forest Defenders' document non-violent protest against the logging of ancient forests. These photographs are a touch misrepresentative of a selection, concentrating on his subtle treatment of light in illustrating the atmosphere of the land. I think they are very beautiful, I hope this beauty is compelling in promoting awareness, I would buy the book if I could. I've been hunting rainbows for some time now...(His website and Redux dealing with representation.)