Location:London
Showing posts with label Book/Magazine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book/Magazine. Show all posts
Meeting Joel Meyerowitz
Have just enjoyed a rare opportunity to meet one of the great street photographers-Joel Meyerowitz at the Photographers Gallery in London after a talk and the launch of his new book 'Taking My Time'.
Koudelka's Theater of Exile
Text from Max
Kozloff, Lone Visions, Crowded Frames
Koudelka's
Theater of Exile
... It's shocking to think
of how much in current Western experience is ruled out by Koudelka, and
nullified as if it never existed. One could search practically in vain for the
historical Europe or the tourist scene, the life of the middle classes,
plastics, the consumer market, signs, cars, modern diversions, blue-collar
existence, productive systems of any kind, in short the characteristic Jamboree
of the late twentieth century. It takes a certain exclusionary genius to have
rejected such a sights while still asserting one's ties to people. A great deal
has been made of the solitary spirit of Koudelka's work, but that spirit
protests too much. Because of his rhetorical estrangement, his world may be as
inhospitable as It is unfamiliar, but it remains a world of minority cultures,
whose religious and funerary rituals It intimately discloses. The question of
how long these cultures will continue to exist in recognizable form is held in
suspense by his imagery. Pre-industrial and mostly unrelated to any sizable
economy, they seem to be holding on, in atrophied, ingrown states, a dwindling
that has spurred him to make his late records. Europe had no place for the
Eastern Slovakian gypsies Koudelka photographed in the sixties, and the Spanish
peasantry of his more recent images would not seem to have the brightest
prospects either. At first glance, it looks as if he's declared his theme to be
rural, Third World poverty, but the faces, though gnarled like those in
undeveloped countries, are Caucasian. What happens in his pictures seems to
have taken place a long time ago, under archaic conditions, hard to remember .
. . so that their actual contemporaneity appears misplaced.
The first plate of
Koudelka's most recent book, Exiles, which accompanied his show at the
International Center of Photography this summer in New York (it had traveled
there from Paris), shows the photographer's left forearm stretched from a
balcony over an empty Prague boulevard. The year is fateful, 1968, and the
gesture is unmistakably that of someone who consults his watch. It's twelve
o'clock, a noon hour here momentous because of its silence and emptiness, as if
to mark a large strike. The photographer engages us with a symbolic interval of
his resistance as a fighter on behalf of the aborted Dubcek liberalization. His
subsequent flight from the Brezhnev armed clampdown, along with numerous other
Czech intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers, was an escape to a freedom in the
West whose embryo promise they had lost at home. (In this era of glasnost, the
persistence of the Czech regime in its singularly reactionary unbending course
indicates all the more glaringly what they were up against.)
In the case of Koudelka,
however, welcome into Western creative circles did not lead him to an
endorsement of the materialism, much less the capitalist ethic, that surrounded
him there. The only pictures really impacted with things in his entire career
are of Soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia, swarmed over by defiant but impotent
crowds during the time of national humiliation and trauma. Events like that
have the capacity to mark an artist's vision. Though befriended in the West
(particularly at the photo agency of Paris Magnum, which took him as a member),
and clearly grateful for it, Koudelka was never consoled. It can be argued that
this diffident man, who lives and travels as lightly as possible, is by
temperament an uprooted character. In the early sixties, as a young man, an
aeronautical engineer and theater photographer, he had already been taking
pictures of the outcast gypsies, a foretaste of his experience as one
expatriated in his own turn. Still, there had once been a homeland for his
alienation, and now he was forced to reproduce and project it by the sheer
strength of his nomadic will. So, the pictorial introduction of his book is
also really a closing down, a climax from which there could only follow an
anticlimax. But from that ensues his meaning, as it's realized that our Western
Europe has been suffused by Koudelka's downcast view of Eastern Europe.
...
One of his admirers, Romeo
Martinez, observes that "Koudelka has recognized in the theater a form and
a metaphor of life." This idea is seconded by Robert Delpire, who not only
originally organized Koudelka's recent show, in France, but was the first to
publish Frank's Americans in the fifties. Delpire says that Koudelka's
work is "marked by a sort of theatrical organization of reality." In
such a view, the subjects of the photographs function as players on a stage,
and it is true that some of them perform obvious roles, such as a little boy
with angel wings and sneakers on a bicycle, or a young gypsy man cuffed and
condemned on the edge of a village. Interestingly, both these individuals are
removed from their nominal audiences but are close to the camera. Imaginative
or real as were their onetime scripts, they now perform unknowingly in dramas
devised on the spot by the spectator's eye of the itinerant photographer. He is
an expert in showing us two or more scenarios adjacent to each other in the
frame, not merely keeping track of them but welding them together freshly in a
new production. A one-armed bather seems resentful of a squalling baby on a
Portuguese beach-as far as Koudelka will go in depicting vacation. Some kids
horse around in a Spanish alley while just around the corner, in the foreground
and out of their sight, a baggily dressed fellow seems to play uninvited
hide-and-seek. Four Irishmen piss against the wall of a concrete trench, and
though they avoid noticing each other, as men typically do in such quarters,
Koudelka, behind them, makes a dramatic synthesis of their isolation.
While the town or village
offers Koudelka's theatrical flair such glints of reduced sociality (which are
humorous and a little sinister), what of the country? He almost seems to thrill
to the depressing vacancy of open reaches and plains. He's a vagrant explorer
of unpopulated places where every now and then he finds like-minded passersby, animal
or human. He insists on the freedom to be without direction, to be derelict, to
be attracted to the unlovely and unploughed field or heath, where there is no
refuge from the feeling of loss. Here is nature, spoiled not by industry-but by
the viewer's own malaise. Koudelka's pictures of this type never make it to the
status of landscape. The weather is bad. Someone throws up a ball, in poetic
ennui, and a horse lounges in the distance. Later in his work, we realize that
this desolate mode overmasters; the ecstatic one of the denser groupings. The
impression grows that an admirable independence of spirit can have its morbid
side: instead of going his own way, the photographer shuns people out of
reclusive need, weariness perhaps, or suspicion. If the smallest incident or
modest object-a glance, graceful debris-becomes an event, it may be because of
a disheartened vitality that has to disguise itself.
Czeslaw Milosz on Exiles
Koudelka
ON EXILE
While writing this
essay I had before my eyes Josef Koudelka's photographs. Let my words serve as
a tribute to his art of telling stories without words.
Rhythm is at the core
of human life. It is, first of all, the rhythm of the organism, ruled by the
heartbeat and circulation of blood. As we live in a pulsating, vibrating world,
we respond to it and in turn are bound to its rhythm. Without giving much
thought to our dependence on the systoles and distoles of flowing time we move
through sunrises and sunsets, through the sequences of four seasons. Repetition
enables us to form habits and to accept the world as familiar Perhaps the need
of a routine is deeply rooted in the very structure of our bodies.
In a city or a
village which we have known well since our childhood we move in a tamed space,
our occupations finding everywhere expected landmarks that favor routine.
Transplanted into alien surroundings we are oppressed by the anxiety of
indefiniteness, by insecurity There are too many new shapes and they remain
fluid, because the principle of their order through routine cannot be
discovered. What I am saying is perhaps just a generalization of my own
experience but I hope to be understood as that experience has been shared by
many especially in this century.
Among the misfortunes
of exile, anxiety of the unfamiliar holds a prominent place. Whoever has found
himself as an immigrant in a big foreign city had to cope with a kind of envy
at the sight of its inhabitants engaged in purposeful occupations, confidently
going to definite, known to them, shops or offices, in a world weaving together
a huge fabric of everyday bustle. It is possible that such an observer from the
outside would have recourse to special strategies in order to diminish his
feeling of alienation. Living in Paris, I was for a long time drawing a line
around a few streets in the Latin Quarter, so that I could call a certain area
mine." A restaurant at the corner, a small bookstore, a laundry, a cafe
succeeded each other when I was taking a walk and would give me some assurance
through their presence at the points expected in advance.
To be lost in a
foreign city. Perhaps something more is involved here than a mere inability to
find one's way It once happened to me, also in Paris, a city of my many joyous
moments and many misfortunes, when I stepped out of the Métro in a part of the
town with which I was acquainted but not too well. I started to walk and
suddenly I noticed that there was not even one spot to serve me as a guide mark
and I was seized by a sort of fear of height. The houses seemed to turn around
and threaten to fall. I lost orientation. And I was quite aware that my
indecision of which street to take reflected my loss of orientation in a deeper
sense. Exile deprives one of the points of reference that helped us to make
projects, choose our goals, to organize our activities. In our native countries
we maintained a peculiar relationship with our predecessors, with writers if we
were writers, with painters if we were painters, etc., and that was a
relationship of both respect and opposition; our driving force was to better them
in one or another manner and to add our name to the roster of names remembered
by our village, our city, or country Here, abroad, nothing of that is left, we
have been catapulted out of history, which is always the history of a specific
area on the map, and we have to cope with, to use an expression of an exile
writer, "the unbearable lightness of being."
The recovery is slow
and never complete. There is a period when we refuse to recognize that our
displacement is irrevocable and no political or economic changes in the country
of our origin can bring about our return. Then slowly we come to the
realization that exile is not just a physical phenomenon of crossing state
borders, for it grows on us, transforms us from within, and becomes our fate.
The undifferentiated mass of human types, streets, monuments, fashions, trends
acquires some distinct features and gradually the strange transforms itself
into the familiar At the same time, however, the memory preserves a topography
of our past, and this dual observance keeps us apart from our fellow citizens.
"Having left
your native land, don't look back, the Erinyes are behind you." One of the
Pythagorean principles, the advice is good but difficult to follow. It is true,
the Erinyes are there, behind your back, and their very sight may petrify a
mortal. Some say them to be daughters of Earth, others, daughters of Night, in
any case they arrive from the depth of the underworld, are winged, and in their
hair carry twisting serpents. They are your punishment for your past offenses
and you know well that you cannot claim purity whether you are aware of your
failings or not. The best protection against the Erinyes would be, indeed,
never to look back. And yet it is impossible not to look back, for there, in
the land of your ancestors, of your language, of your family, a treasure has
been left, more valuable than any riches measured by money, namely, colors,
shapes, intonations, details of architecture, everything that shapes one's
childhood. By letting your memory speak you wake up the past and by the same
token attract the Erinyes; yet man stripped of memory is hardly human or he
represents only a very impoverished humanity Thus a contradiction appears and
you have to learn how to live with it. There is another aspect of exile
considered as a specific affliction of the twentieth century The most famous of
the exile writers of the past, Dante, after leaving his native Florence,
wandered all his life from one city to another but today those cities hardly
can mean "abroad" as they are all situated in Italy Dante died and
was buried in Ravenna which today doesn't seem at all a land distant from his
birthplace. Could it happen that with the shrinkage of the planet Earth
distances but also differences between particular countries grow smaller and
smaller? Perhaps it would be possible to visualize a modern pilgrim's
wanderings as his going from one place to another within one country, whether
that country is called Europe, a continent, or the world? If this is not so
now, there is a certain latent dynamism inherent in the progress of technology,
which pushes in that direction. The twentieth century also brings a
quantitative change as befits an era of population explosion. In Dante's time
the number of people leaving the towns and villages where they were born was
very small. Now hundreds of thousands, and even millions, migrate, chased from
their homes by war, by harsh economic necessities, or political persecution,
and an expatriate, for instance a writer, an artist, an intellectual who left
his country for his own, so to say, fastidious reasons, motivated as he was not
only by fear of starvation or of the police, cannot isolate his fate from the
fate of those masses. Their nomadic existence, the slums they often inhabit,
the deserts of dirty streets where their children play are, in a way, his own;
he feels solidarity with them and he only wonders whether this is not an image,
more and more generalized, of the human condition. For life in exile seems no
more limited to a transplantation from one country to another Industrial
centers attract people who leave their peaceful but impoverished rural
districts, new towns grow where a few decades ago only cattle were grazing,
shacks and barracks of slums surround big capitals. When characterizing the
indefiniteness and insecurity inherent in exile one notices that practically
everything that is said on the subject applies to the new inhabitants of the
urban landscape, even if they have not arrived from foreign lands. Alienation
becomes a predicament of too many human beings to be considered an affliction
of a special category, and the self-pity of an emigre reflecting on that
phenomenon is undermined.
Perhaps a loss of
harmony with the surrounding space, the inability to feel at home in the world,
so oppressing to an expatriate, a refugee, an immigrant, however we call him,
paradoxically integrates him in contemporary society and makes him, if he is an
artist, understood by all. Even more, to express the existential situation of
modern man, one must live in exile of some sort. Are not Samuel Beckett's plays
about exile? Time in them is not perceived as a serene repetition favoring a
gladly accepted routine; on the contrary, it is empty and destructive, it
rushes forward to an illusory goal and closes on itself in a display of
futility Man in those plays cannot enter into a contact with space which is
abstract, uniform, deprived of specific objects, in all probability a desert.
Writing this I am
visited by a tune of an old religious song in Polish which begins: "Exiles
of Eve, we beseech Thy help." And indeed an archetypal exclusion from the
Garden of Eden repeats itself in our lives, whether Eden be the womb of our
mother or the enchanting garden of our early childhood. Centuries of tradition
are behind the image of the whole earth as a land of exile, usually presented
as a desertic, sterile landscape in which Adam and Eve march, their heads
despondently lowered. They were chased from their native realm, their true home
where the same rhythm has ruled over their bodies and their surroundings, where
no separation and no nostalgia has been known. Looking back, they may see fiery
swords guarding the Gates of Paradise. Their nostalgic thinking about a return
to the once happy existence is intensified by their awareness of prohibition.
And yet they will never completely relinquish the thought of the day when their
exile will end. Later, much later on, perhaps that dream will take the shape of
a golden city lasting beyond time, of a heavenly Jerusalem.
The biblical image
favors a cliche according to which exile means looking back towards the country
of one's origin. And, indeed, many poems and novels have been written in this
century by exiles who describe a region of the world from where they have come
as more beautiful than it had been in reality, simply because now it is lost
forever Yet an objection imposes itself here. Displacement creates a distance
measured by kilometers or miles, hundreds and thousands of miles. The biblical
image is that of a movement in space from the Gates of Eden or, translating
this into modern notions, from the borders of a state guarded by armed
soldiers. However, distance may be measured not only in miles, but also in
months, years, or dozens of years. Assuming this, we may consider the life of
every human being as an unrelenting movement from childhood on, through the
phases of youth, maturity, and old age. The past of every individual undergoes
constant transformations in his or her memory and more often than not it acquires
the features of an irretrievable land made more and more strange by the flow of
time. Thus the difference between a displacement in space and in time is
somewhat blurred. We can well imagine an old expatriate who, meditating on the
country of his youth, realizes that he is separated from it not only by
expanse, but also by the wrinkles on his face and grey hair, marks left by a
severe border guard, time. What then is exile if, in this sense, everybody
shares that condition?
Nevertheless, the
condition of exile in a geographical sense is real enough and those whose fate
is to experience it have been using various consolations to make it less
depressing. An awareness of its universal character in this century may provide
considerable relief and even induce a pride of belonging to an avant-garde. In
addition, such an awareness draws encouragement from the fact that history
knows big countries founded by wanderers, among them, America. An artist and a
writer in exile are, however, confronted with the insidious question of his or
her creativity or paralysis. An argument has been advanced many times according
to which there is a mysterious link between the land of our ancestors, its
soil, its light, sounds of its language on the one hand and the creative powers
of the individual on the other It is said that our sources of inspiration risk
to dry out abroad. And in fact a great number of people who were gifted,
brilliant, promising poets, painters, musicians have been leaving their
countries only to suffer defeat and to plunge into anonymity that would cover
their names forever There is much truth in the assertion that the native soil
possesses a vivifying force, even if we put aside the obvious, namely the
mother tongue and its irreplaceable nuances. Fear of sterility is a companion
of every expatriate artist and though it visits artists in general, its
presence in that particular case is felt more strongly. To calm it, the most
useful is to invoke the names of all those who despite the odds have not lost
the game. Fundamental works of poetry in some languages, for instance, Polish
and Armenian, have been written abroad, owing to the political persecution
practiced by foreign occupying powers. Decades spent in Paris far from his
native provincial town, Witebsk, didn't discourage Marc Chagall from following
his original inspiration and he continued to fly in the sky together with the
roofs of huts, with the goats and cows of his childhood and early youth. Isaac
Bashevis Singer recreated in America through memory and imagination the life
gone forever of the Polish Jews. It is doubtful whether James Joyce's Ulysses
could have been written in Dublin, it is more probable to assume that his
estrangement and his refusal to serve Irish patriotic goals were necessary
preconditions for his description of Ireland from afar And Igor Stravinsky, in
spite of malicious rumors, according to which after the Rite of Spring his
talent, not enlivened by Russia, was on the wane, remained productive and very
Russian during his long exile.
In every one of these
examples, and they can be multiplied, a pattern is noticeable. A farewell to
one's country, to its landscapes, customs and mores throws one into a no man's
land comparable perhaps to the desert chosen as a place of contemplation by
early Christian hermits. Then the only remedy against the loss of orientation
is to create anew one's own North, East, West, and South and posit in that new
space a Witebsk or a Dublin elevated to the second power What has been lost is
recuperated on a higher level of vividness and presence.
Exile is a test of
internal freedom and that freedom is terrifying. Everything depends upon our
own resources, of which we are mostly unaware and yet we make decisions
assuming our strength will be sufficient. The risk is total, not assuaged by
the warmth of a collectivity where the second rate is usually tolerated,
regarded as useful and even honored. Now to win or to lose appears in a crude
light, for we are alone and loneliness is a permanent affliction of exile. Once
Friedrich Nietzsche exalted the freedom of height, of loneliness, of the
desert. Freedom of exile is of that lofty sort, though it is imposed by
circumstances and, therefore, deprived of bathos. A brief formula may encapsule
the outcome of that struggle with our own weakness: exile destroys, but if it
fails to destroy you, it makes you stronger.
The exodus of people
from their countries is a familiar feature in our century and it has been
categorized under various names. The Russian Revolution resulted in the
appearance of Russian emigres in the big cities of the West. Soon they were
joined by refugees from Hitler's Germany and ex-soldiers from the Spanish
Republican Army. At the end of World War II a defeated Germany was full of
displaced persons called D.F.'s, former slave laborers and survivors of
concentration camps, also of Germans expelled from the Eastern provinces. In
the subsequent decades a wave of migrations from Central-Eastern Europe has
been due to political spasms (the crushed Hungarian uprising, the invasion of
Czechoslovakia, the martial law in Poland) or to the economic attractiveness of
the capitalist West. Similar names and categories can be found in Africa and
Asia, the exodus of the "Boat People" from Vietnam being the most
famous case. Though officials, charged with granting or refusing to a newcomer
the right to stay, distinguish between ideological and economic motives,
reality is more complex than that and a given person has usually been pushed to
migrate by a tangle of reasons. One thing is certain: people leave their
homelands because life there is difficult to bear.
Can we imagine a world in
which the phenomenon of exile disappears because it is unnecessary? To envisage
such a possibility would mean to disregard the current that seems to carry us
in the opposite direction. What is probable is the increase of awareness that
whoever looks for happiness in distant lands must be prepared for
disillusionment or even for the doubtful reward of one who jumps from the
trying pan into the fire. That awareness, of course, would not discourage
anybody, for the pain we feel at a given moment is more real than the pain we
may endure in the future. This earth with all its charms and beauty is after
all the earth of the "Exiles of Eve." An old anecdote about a refugee
in a travel agency has not lost its bite: a refugee from war-torn Europe,
undecided as to what continent and what state would be far off enough and safe
enough, for a while was pensively turning a globe with his finger, then asked,
"don't you have something else?"
Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers
Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers
Details from Aperture
Japanese photographers have created a tradition strikingly different from that of their Western counterparts. Their work is based on ideas, rules, and aesthetics that are specific to Japanese culture but often little known in the West. Many photographers throughout the history of the medium in Japan—including master postwar photographers such as Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, and Nobuyoshi Araki—have produced substantial bodies of written work that form an essential counterpart to their visual art. Setting Sun is an anthology of key texts written from the 1950s to the present by Moriyama, Tomatsu, and Araki, as well as by other leading Japanese photographers, including Masahisa Fukase, Takashi Homma, Eikoh Hosoe, Takuma Nakahira, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The only anthology of its kind to appear in English, Setting Sun makes these texts available in translation to Western readers for the first time and provides a crucial context for photographers who have become increasingly well known and admired in the West. Each chapter in the anthology is devoted to a central idea or theme that is particular to Japanese photography, such as watashi shosetsu (or the "I novel"), the bonds between man and woman, the role of nostalgia, and the shadows of a war lost and of a culture jettisoning its past. These writings vary in form from diary entry to scholarly treatise, but all reflect a clear connection between word and image. This connection is so essential that no comprehensive consideration of Japanese photography can be complete without familiarity with these writings.
Lee Friedlander: America by Car
Photo Lee Friedlander
At the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London
Timothy Taylor Gallery is proud to announce an exhibition of two bodies of work by the influential and critically acclaimed American photographer Lee Friedlander, on display for the first time in the UK. This will be Friedlanderʼs first solo exhibition in London since his 1976 show at the Photographersʼ Gallery.
Lee Friedlander: America By Car charts numerous journeys made by the photographer during the last decade across most of the fifty US states. Shot entirely from the interiors of rental cars, typically from the driverʼs seat, Friedlander makes use of side and rearview mirrors, windscreens, and side windows as framing devices for a total of 192 images.
In America By Car, Friedlander uses the quintessential icons of US culture – cars and the open road – to explore contemporary America, revisiting in the process many of the places and strategies that he has incorporated into his practice throughout his career.
In America By Car, Friedlander uses the quintessential icons of US culture – cars and the open road – to explore contemporary America, revisiting in the process many of the places and strategies that he has incorporated into his practice throughout his career.
Functioning as an introduction to America by Car we are also very pleased to be simultaneously exhibiting The New Cars 1964 portfolio, also previously unseen in the UK.
Comprising of 33 works in total, The New Cars 1964 was the result of a commission for Harperʼs Bazaar to mark the unveiling of the much-anticipated new car models of that year: Chryslers, Buicks, Pontiacs and Cadillacs.
Comprising of 33 works in total, The New Cars 1964 was the result of a commission for Harperʼs Bazaar to mark the unveiling of the much-anticipated new car models of that year: Chryslers, Buicks, Pontiacs and Cadillacs.
A pleasant surprise and my first visit to the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London was this exhibition of work from Lee Friedlander. Social Landscapes as he refers to his own work.
America by Car features 90+ monochrome photographs, all shot using a wide angle lens from inside a car, splitting the image to reveal different elements and also reflections in mirrors and glass. The story travels through the US and features only a few prints with people. Four of the last five prints include stop signs and the final photograph is of Friedlander himself looking into his car holding the cable release, a fitting end...
The Education of a Photographer (2006)
"...it quickly became crystal clear that while photography students had a wealth of material on the technique, technology, history, and theory of photography, there was surfeit of inspirational and informative material on what it means to be a photographer." (Steven Heller).
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