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

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.

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'

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)...'

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.

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.

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)

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.)

Eric Carroll's Sunburn

'Sunburn is a meditation on landscape, particularly the photographic cliché of the sunset. Eric William Carroll asks, "Why do we feel the need to repeatedly photograph something that happens every day? Is it beauty? Is it time?" Using photographs of landscapes and sunsets found in the dumpsters of one-hour-photo stores, Carroll pushes the images into sublime fields of color through bleaching and silk-screening. In the end, the artist hopes not to describe the beauty of a sunset, but rather re-imagine it.' quoted from here- Eric's website here and blog here

Martin Parr

Like every photographer must do eventually, no matter how different the intent, I find myself photographing following in the footsteps of Martin Parr. Sometimes I think that there must be several Martin Parr's, or perhaps, more likely, his sleep patterns are like those of Margaret Thatcher. His photos from the total eclipse in Cornwall in 1999, show the impact of the weather on any photographer, they are good, but not fantastic... but of course there is something terribly British about the bloody rain: '"The weather bonded people together," reports Parr. "The atmosphere was good- humoured - it was the Dunkirk spirit, and all that."' The best photograph, most classically Parr in its post-modern document, comes from the following day: 'On returning home to Bristol, Parr realised he hadn't documented the full story. "I got back and switched on the 11pm news, and all the newspapers had this picture on their front cover. I thought, `I must photograph people reading it.' So the next day, I went to Weston- super-Mare to find someone."'

Parr does work constantly, which I really respect, and this must feed back to the ground-breaking work that he does and has produced, ground-breaking regardless of personal taste. In addition, surely Magnum must appreciate him keeping them in post-its and beer for their annual knees-up. (quotes from this Independent feature, images Magnum)

Ryan McGinley

Ryan McGinley's new photographs, pass far beyond the low-fi aesthetic; capturing beautifully ecstatic experience. His road trips are a structure to make photographs of an idyllic imagined summer- naked!

Alexander Binder

Via i heart photograph, Alexander Binder's experiments combining home made kaleidoscopes and pinholes with a dslr to create the gorgeous impressions of light (website here). I'm down with his experience of photographing, in particular the spiritual sensation of bringing light, time and experience together: 'I started photography at the age of 14. Since that time I developed a deep interest in not only reproducing a scene but catching the aura of a certain situation. From my point of view traditional processes of capturing light (e.g. camera obscura) are the best solution to merge light, time and space - and thereby reproduce the atmosphere of a special moment.'

Cape Light

I've been thinking about the different properties of colour and black and white film and how these contribute to meaning. Although of course I have used colour film in the past, since I became serious about building a body of work I have used only black and white and digital. This is because of the level of control I can maintain over the appearance of the photograph from capture to print. Yet now in trying to record these solar rituals I find that I need to use colour, that black and white film is not creating the sense of half forgotten memory that I feel photographing these events; and it is important to me that there is a material product created at the instant of capture, so I can't use digital. Joel Meyerowitz explains what this difference means to him in the interview with Bruce MacDonald which prefaces the 'Cape Light' catalogue:

MacDonald: 'What's the difference between light in black and white and light in colour photography? Do you relate differently to the light?

Meyerowitz: 'The fact is that colour film appears to be responsive to the full spectrum of visible light while black and white reduces the spectrum to a very narrow wavelength. This stimulates in the user of each material a different set of responses. A colour photograph gives you a chance to study and remember how things look and feel in colour. It enables you to have feelings along the full wavelength of the spectrum, to retrieve emotions that were perhaps bred in you from infancy- from the warmth and pinkness of your mother's breast, the loving brown of your puppy's face and the friendly yellow of your pudding. Colour is always part of experience. Grass is green, not gray; flesh is colour, not gray. Black and white is a very cultivated response.'

MacDonald: 'What you're saying is that black and white translates light from all the different hues into tone, and there is no way to tell the light reflected from a red from the light reflected from a black?'

Meyerowitz: 'Close. It expresses the light as a matter of intensity. There's no meaning attached to the light.

MacDonald: 'Black and white photography translates colour into form whereas colour photography can convey significance from the very roots of the act of vision itself, from a place where you respond to primal kinds of things- colours, textures, sensations. What does that do for you the sense that you can deal now with all of those primary responses about colour?

Meyerowitz: 'It makes everything more interesting. Colour suggests more things to look at, new subjects for me. Colour suggests that light itself is a subject....'

Gueorgui Pinkhassov

Boris - no his name is Gueorgui- why do I want to call him Boris? because its easier to spell? Anyway, Gueorgui Pinkhassovi is led by light to his images, particularly in the beautiful book Sightwalk , viewable alongside an extended feature Just light like on Magnum. I like especially how the book has been laid out, each image resonating against its opposite counterpart. It makes me think about layout but also wonder whether I mind it having no conclusions. The sequencing is aesthetic, rather than drawn from a verbal idea of narrative. I always felt that it was wrong for understanding of images to mimic understanding of words, but photographs that have aligned themselves with 'meaning' are those which have become verbal descriptions- starving African child, barren landscape, typological portrait of person belonging to weird group. This doesn't seem right, but then this painterly approach has a very slippery sense of meaning, which is what I struggle with myself at the moment. It is much easier to feel secure with what you are doing when it can be read in an instant. Also post Marks and Spencers their description of the book seems a bit absurd this is not just any book.... '"Sightwalk" is more than just a book of photographs. It is a modernist Japanese photograph album created from Oriental fabrics and papers, and bounded by hand. It contains the work of Gueorgui Pinkhassov, a highly-acclaimed photographic artist, innovator and member of Magnum.' ahem!

Adi Lavy's 'Camp Sundown'

Adi Lavy's Camp Sundown series records the reversed life of a summer camp for children who suffer from Xeroderma Pigmentosum, an extremely rare disorder that causes the skin to blister or develop cancer from even the briefest exposure to UV light.

Paul Graham 'American Night'

Where do I begin? Paul Graham's poetry of ethnic segregation in America turns ascribed values of light and dark on their head. Too much light blinds, conceals not reveals, at the outskirts of the perfectly exposed American Dream. Our diurnal relationship with light became perverted through religious and cultural conventions : light, white, good vs dark, black, evil. A better set of explanations here.

Chris McCaw's Sunburns

Chris McCaw's Sunburn project: The extended exposure causes the sun to burn the photographic paper in the camera. The intense light, as with the black suns, causes solarization. I like how, both in his work and Harlan Erskine's Black Sun Project, the discovery has come from involvement with process; playing around with things and the sheer love of photography. Conceptually strong but the concept follows not leads. I find a lot of contemporary art photography quite empty, too sleek and concerned with its own importance, as if it has been conceived in the cafe at an art gallery. Now I understand why photography became obsessed with its own representation but the loss of serendipity, or rather its smooth absorption into art world agendas is tragic. McCaw describes:

"This new project initially began completely by accident. In 2003 an all night exposure of the stars made during a camping trip was lost due to the effects of whiskey. Unable to wake up to close the shutter before sunrise, all the information of the night’s exposure was destroyed. The intense light of the rising sun was so focused and intense that it physically changed the film, creating a new way for me to think about photography."

But it took skill, experimentation and knowledge to convert this discovery into a successful series of photographs as you can read here. I can manage the whisky fuelled camping element, the other parts still require some work, although last time I drank whisky while camping I woke up on the fire, luckily having put it out through rolling across it.

Ansel Adams- The Black Sun

"Drawing on his deep understanding of musical theory, he adapted the language of sound to explain subtle variations of light. From this discovery of the similarities between these physical phenomena he developed in the 1930s his famous Zone System in an attempt to devise a standard procedure for exposure and development that would give consistent negative quality. "The black and white picture known as The Black Sun is one o f your best-known ones. Tell me how you came to take it. I was working in the desert east of the Sierra Nevada a little after sunrise. I wanted to black and white photograph right into the sun, planning to use the brilliant flare as part of the composition. I made several exposures with a 5 x 7 camera and Isopan black and white film; I intended to develop one in Kodak D-23.I knew I might get a little reversal - a phenomenon of excessive exposure - in this negative, and as the sun disc appeared to have slightly less density in the centre of the general flare I decided to develop the next negative in Pyrocatechin, a highly compensating developer. In this negative the disc of the sun was almost fully reversed and has black and white printed very dark. Reversal can be a very exciting effect when it's properly used. I don't think that its physical chemistry is yet completely understood. Actually 'The Black Sun' is not a good description of this black and white picture any more, because it now means the equivalent of a neutron star, and that's an astronomical phenomenon which had not been discovered at the time I made the black and white picture. But I guess the title will stick!" (source- and I'm guessing it is generally from 'Examples- The Making of 40 Photographs')

Olafur Eliasson

So has the study of natural light become less relevant in our neon age? Olafur Eliasson's Domadalur series explore the changing effect of light on landscape just as Monet explored this theme 100 years previously in his Haystacks and Rouen Cathedral series (good article here). As the light changes colour shifts become heightened, in both instances this is highlighted through repetition: a tactic more usually associated with contemporary art than impressionism. Eliasson's explorations through installation go further into our experience of light to transcendent effect, for instance in the Weather Project at the Tate Modern. This was truly a sublime experience, visitors prostrating themselves to the illusion of this hypnotic sun. It seems photography's obsession with light diminished as colour became an accepted medium but as Eliasson observes:-
"Even though one of the largest intercultural common constructions is the agreement about what color is what color (time being the all time largest !), there is still a very large portion of individual opinion about color (unlike time). Color has in its abstraction an enormous psychological and associative potential, and even though color has been cultivated to the extreme the amount of individuality in experiencing colors is equally extreme.This points to that color doesn’t exist in itself, but only when looked at. The unique fact that color so to speak only materializes when light bounces off it into our retinal circus shows us that analyzing colors is in fact about the ability to analyze ourselves."

Tim Davis

Furthering the idea that light may pervert perception Tim Davis' Permanent Collection and Illilluminations. This though, artificial light, understandably long considered shady...