Interior – Parc des Ateliers, Arles

I spent last week in Arles, during the latter stages of the annual photographic festival.  Some of the exhibitions closed at the end of August; others on 6th September; but the majority remain open until the coming weekend.  Outside of the holiday season and in the context of these reductions, one might assume it would be quiet.  Broadly speaking, it was, but since the schools are back, there were occasional tides of young people, one of which beached itself for some time across the floor of the Lisa Barnard exhibition in the Prix Découverte, having a full class conducted by their teacher!  The peace was also disturbed later in the week by the Feria du Riz which, despite the name, has more to do with bull-fighting than rice.  Bulls being driven through the streets by Les Guardians (Camargue cowboys) and stunningly loud music across the town centre until the early hours – but, actually, a wonderful little old city, with some serious (and expanding) cultural activities.  It was a marvellous week.

… and so to some highlights from the exhibitions; and a few critical views as well.  Looking for highlights, it’s hard to get past the two big US photographers on show – Walker Evans and Stephen Shore.  The former was a slightly different take on Evans, partly curated by David Campany, and focusing principally on his magazine work.  Many of the classic Evans images/series were for magazines, of course, and here they were displayed in the original magazines, also in many cases as prints, but most interestingly, also as ‘blown-up’ versions of the magazine pages, unframed, in high-contrast, pasted on the walls.  It worked really well – for me anyway – the full-bleed, high-contrast, pasted presentation made for a poster-like temporariness that linked well to their original purpose; but it also gave them an added presence (aura?) and had the practical benefit that lots of people could look/read at the same time.  One was reminded that Evans did just about everything, photographically, that there is to do.  The accompanying text in the articles, often his own, was ‘of its time’, the great modernist American vision, but I detected occasional signs that his tongue might have been in his cheek, at times.  Not when he was railing against modern design it wasn’t, though.

The Stephen Shore was a major retrospective that is touring the world over the next eighteen months to two years.  A wide-ranging show, it included work from his early teens to a recent series in Winslow Arizona, from 2013, incorporating (I think) all of American Surfaces and Uncommon Places (and some workbooks from the latter).  Just seeing the whole range was interesting in itself, but the show was well-presented, with supporting curatorial notes that were informative but not over-bearing or excessively prescriptive.  The movement from black and white to colour, to black and white, then back to colour (digital) was neatly explained – largely, Shore feeling he’d done that and wanted to do something else, which makes good sense.  Seeing all the work together emphatically brings home his sensitivity to, and experimentation with, the camera’s particular ways of ‘seeing’.  I liked the last two sentences of the note below, which accompanied the most recent Winslow series.  Shore has been working extensively with digital cameras and these notes seem to strongly refute the idea that this has to mean the photographer must automatically be working quickly and not in the thoughtful and contemplative manner some think is only achievable with film!

Whatever the camera/process, the artist/photographer is the one determining how the image is made. Speaking of which, here is another artist who works slowly and painstakingly with digital processes.

Facades, Markus Brunetti, Arles 2015

Markus Brunetti has been working exclusively, for ten years, on a series of huge images of the facades of prominent European religious buildings.  Clearly influenced by the Bechers, Gursky etc, he (with his partner) has carefully photographed and re-photographed, piece by piece, compiling monumentally-sized digital images, which have been ‘cleaned’ of all traces of wear and tear, bird droppings, graffiti, and whatever else might get in the way of a hyper-real outcome that presents the buildings with a perspective and a presence that no one has ever actually seen except in these images.  It’s a superb demonstration of the photographic images ability to play on the unconscious eye, so that there is a sense in which this is what the buildings ‘really’ look like – yet they never have and never will!  I really enjoyed them.  They are very seductive, beautifully printed, so that the viewer is drawn into the detail, all of which is there, as if the stones and carvings had just been placed there yesterday.  Yet at another level, they are utterly meaningless!  They only really tell us that Brunetti (and his team) have spent days and days making them; they have no other purpose than the spectacle of their own ‘madeness’!  Now, where have I made those kind of comments before? Here, of course, when I was looking at the work of Thomas Demand.  There is a video about the work here.

Moving on to something that left a less positive impression but could be interpreted as comment on the effectiveness of the photographic image – Heavens, by Paulo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti.

This is about tax havens and their significance in the global economy.  There is a good video of Woods talking about the show here.  Before I launch into my ‘critique’, let me stress that I am no fan of tax havens, global capitalism, or the blatant exploitation of the ‘have-nots’ by the ‘haves’.  Nor do I have any problem with the extensive piece of investigative journalism that these two have undertaken.  I do have reservations, though, about its effectiveness as a photographic/art exhibition and, to an extent, with its presence in this important international festival – in the form it takes.  Is it a piece of good documentary photography?  I would say ‘possibly not’!  These are – as Woods says in the video – glossy, large-scale images, making use of the aesthetic of the global corporation, often featuring prominent bankers, government officials etc.  And if you just look at the images, that’s what you see (again, as Woods says).  It’s only when you read the detailed captions at the side of the image that you understand what’s going on.  So, one might argue, what is the point of the images?  What do they add to the message?  So one might interpret the show as a critique of the documentary image and it’s effectiveness in the 21st century.  Though I don’t think that was the intention!  I’m tempted to copy their caption style with something along the lines of:

Two contemporary documentary photographers travel the world, visiting remote tax havens where the wealthy and the corporate deposit and structure their finances so as to avoid or minimise the tax they pay.  They create large-scale glossy portraits of some of the key ‘players’ in their playgrounds, print them very big, and present them at an international photography festival in the South of France.  They are on show there for two months, seen by thousands, and in the meantime, nothing changes!

OK, not entirely fair, perhaps, but that was my reaction to the show.  Without the text, it was meaningless; without the images, it might still have worked!

I saw much more – interesting ‘emerging’ artists and the ‘dummy’ books, too.  But this will suffice for a main post on the subject.  I’ll return to the books later, in the context of the Textbook project.

It isn’t often that you enter the front door of a gallery to be immediately confronted by the artwork, scattered all over the floor in front of you such that you have no option but to walk on it!  But that is exactly what happens when you arrive at Bank Street Arts to view Tom Stayte’s #selfie – immediate engagement and participation.  I was there on Saturday, with a small group of OCA photography students, for a study visit led by tutor Andrew Conroy and including the opportunity to talk with Tom Stayte, the creator.  The work (see here) was Tom’s graduate show at Sheffield Hallam University; is currently on show at Bank Street; and will be at the forthcoming Format Festival – and rightly so!

Where to start? Probably with a description, I think; though the work doesn’t fit neatly into any formal categories.  At the core, but hidden within a white plinth, is a computer.  It is running some bespoke software that constantly looks at uploads to Instagram that are tagged #selfie. The image is ‘examined’ to see whether it contains a single face, and if it does, the image file is downloaded.  A monitor on top of the plinth relentlessly lists the files as they come down.  On the front of the plinth is a thermal printer – the sort of thing that prints receipts at the supermarket, no ink involved and paper supplied from a large roll.  As the image files are downloaded, it prints each one, low quality monochrome, to a standard size, and then cuts each one, leaving it to fall on the floor in front of the plinth.  (There is potential comparison with 24 Hours, the work in which Erik Kessels printed every image that was uploaded to Flickr on a single day; which I saw in Arles 2013.) Tom estimates that it prints an image every five seconds and it chattered and chopped endlessly throughout the two hours plus that I was there.  The prints from the graduate show have been brought forward to this show and the plan is to take these ones on to Format.  The estimate is around 100,000 so far!  It is only running when Bank Street is open, of course.

So, one might ask ‘what is it?’ – a piece of research, social comment, political provocation – well, my reading is that Tom’s intention is that it is a work of art, and that is how I would view it.  And art is entitled to ask and provoke questions without providing answers – which is exactly what #selfie does, in my view.  It is a provocative piece, from the moment you enter, as I’ve suggested.  Is it appropriation?  The work uses thousands of photographic images, created by thousands of photographers all over the world, without any formal ‘rights’, so ‘appropriation’ would certainly seem like a word that could be applied.  Is it curation? There is an element of selection (even if it is automated) of printing and display.  And as the image above shows, a degree of participative curation is happening, with viewers encouraged to rummage amongst the output and look for patterns, anomalies, whatever, and pin them on the wall.  So the art is evolving as it is viewed.  Is it, maybe, even, a kind of performance?  Once the computer and printer are in action, there is a kind of hypnotic effect as you watch and listen – yes, sound is a part of it, actually; you can hear it in the video on Tom’s website.  Is it, perhaps, something uniquely digital; a new form of art that could only be associated with ‘now’?  It is certainly an example of an artist embracing what digital technology has to offer as a form of expression and representation; a way of creating potential for meaning for the viewer.

The work does, of course, invite thought and reflection on the phenomenon that has become the ‘selfie’.  It has its own inherent definition of what the term means – an image of a single face uploaded to Instagram and tagged #selfie, for the purposes of the project.  That imposes some inevitable boundaries and almost certainly means that we’re looking at the tip of a very big iceberg of what actually exist as potential ‘selfies’ in internet-space.  On SelfieCity, a project led by digital media writer Dr Lev Manovich, Alise Tifentale’s essay The Selfie: Making Sense of “Masturbation of Self-Image” and the “Virtual Mini-Me”, quotes the Oxford Dictionary definition of ‘a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with smartphone or webcam and uploaded to social media website’ – but Selfie City’s project, like Tom’s work, uses Instagram as the source of its images.  But perhaps the most obvious question that this work raises, whatever the definition and source of the information, is ‘Why?’. Why do all these (predominantly young – that’s clear from a quick scan of the faces upturned on the floor at Bank Street) people want to make and share public ‘selfies’?

Tifentale’s article reviews academia’s response to the selfie, from which she concludes with these phrases – means of self-expression; construction of a positive image; tool of self-promotion; cry for attention and love; way to express belonging to a certain community.  All of those, individually and collectively, could be concluded as one stands amongst the output from #selfie and watches the mounting mass of images.  At the same time, partly prompted by Tom’s understandable choice of a cheap, low-aesthetic method of printing, the utter pointlessness of it all comes across strongly.  These are instant, throwaway images; and surrounded by tens of thousands of them in a small space, it’s actually hard to see the connection with a ‘positive image’ (especially seeing the expressions on some of the faces).  The sharing and belonging makes some sense – after all, it is the existence of a sharing platform, Instagram in this case, that makes the whole concept of the proliferation of the phenomenon possible in the first place.  And, whilst these are all public images available for the world to see, one might propose that they are primarily directed at friends and contacts, rather than the global audience. (Though, as we speculated on Saturday, few of the uploaders can have anticipated that, within seconds, they would be part of an art installation in Sheffield!!)

For my own part, both at the exhibition and in subsequent reflection, I feel most drawn to a comparison with language – both spoken and written.  These small, individual, seemingly insignificant images are like words – spoken or written to friends.  Maybe most like spoken words, in the way that they are created and dispatched into the ether – then often forgotten and ignored.  Sitting with a friend, having a drink, at a bar in sunny New York, Joe says to Anna, “This is nice; I feel really relaxed.” Then he lifts up his phone and creates a selfie, uploads it to Instagram, and a few moments later, their friends Jack and Lucy in London see the image and Jack says “Joe looks happy.”

Of course, as he’s saying that, #selfie in Sheffield prints Joe’s picture and Stan picks it up from the floor and pins it to the wall, with several others of people wearing reflective sunglasses, that have been uploaded in the last couple of hours!

There exists a potential for some negative reading in this, naturally.  What does it say about people’s willingness to share many aspects of their lives through a media that is open to all sorts of exploitation and control by all manner of other individuals and organisations – corporate, official, criminal, insane?  My own take, whilst certainly acknowledging such negative readings, is that I am mostly drawn back again to these comparisons with casual conversation and social interaction.  The ubiquitous shared digital image seems to me to have much in common with the shared words of language – pictures painting a thousand words etc.

Many thanks to Andrew for leading such a fascinating and thought-provoking study visit – and, of course, to Tom Stayte, for creating such a stimulating & novel project and for spending time with us on Saturday.

I finally managed to get to this exhibition – and I wasn’t disappointed!  Fontcuberta’s work has already featured in here and in my Contextual Studies, as has his writing.  His highly creative and imaginative use of photography to create fiction; his intelligent and thoughtful essays; and his subversive sense of humour, too; they have all proved informative and inspirational for this Body of Work.  But this was, apart from the occasional image seen in multiple-person exhibitions, my first opportunity to look at his work ‘first hand’.  The show, which moved up from Media Space at the Science Museum in London to the National Media Museum in Bradford, during the autumn, includes work from six different projects.  It seems sensible to look at them under those six headings.

Fauna

Based on the ‘discovery’ by Fontcuberta and a colleague, of the archive of mysterious and controversial ‘zoologist’ ‘Professor Peter Ameisenhaufen’, Fauna presents ‘documentary evidence’ in the form of diaries, photographs and ‘taxidermy’ of the strange creatures that he came across through his research and network of ‘informants’.  It is, of course, all fiction, but superbly presented – and all the more subversive and provocative for that.  There are samples of handwritten notebooks, smudged, stained and blotted;  there are bone samples, sound recordings, even ‘stuffed’ animals; there are typed up versions of the handwritten notes, printed on yellowish, punched paper and pasted to the ‘museum-green’ walls; and of course there is the indisputable photographic evidence – black and white, grainy, sometimes blurred by the ‘animal’s’ movement!  All of which creates a slightly dated, museumish feel  that at one and the same time precisely reproduces the evidence-based approach of many 19th and early 20th century scientific explorers, and totally subverts it.

A number of points worth noting to inform my own work are:

• the combination of text with photographic images to create fictions;
• the appropriation of photographic (and language) styles;
• the deadpan delivery, but with humour;
• and the way in which, besides the direct questions about photography and truth/evidence, the work touches on some wider ethical issues e.g. the recurring and apparently innocent explanations of the deaths of the captured species, the references to their behaviour in the contexts of birth, death, reproductions, responses to humans;
• the completeness and thoroughness of what was presented.

Herbarium

Again, strong references to traditional photography of botanical specimen, e.g. Bosshardt, applied to constructed ‘plant’ samples that are completely artificial and made from all sorts of household objects, as well as real plant parts.  The selection of beautifully lit and printed black and white images was displayed on a single wall, perfectly evenly spaced, in three rows, with an equivalent numbered printed key at each end that listed their scientific names. An entirely ‘convincing’ and deadpan presentation which again both reproduced and subverted the original genre of image.  A strong reminder here of how aesthetics can add credence to a photographic presentation – even a fictitious one.

Orogenesis

In this work, Foncuberta moves into the genre of Landscape – in traditional painting, in fine art photography, and even in geography.  These images, printed large scale and often in full colour, mimic the sublime modernist landscape photographs; yet, once again, they are fictions, and not even photographs in this case.  In many cases, they combine, strangely, map-reading software and paintings.  The software, used by geographers, reads scanned map images and converts them into 3-D terrains.  But Fontcuberta has (as he put it in one of the exhibitions films) also ‘fooled’ the computer.  Instead of maps, he has fed in scans of paintings (and of body parts in some cases), from which the software creates 3-D fictions, to which he then adds details, such as animals and water and sky.  The outcome is interesting and effective – though it does have a computer-generated feel about it, to be truthful.  And this reaction was probably not helped by having watched one of Disney’s most recent animations, Frozen, a few days before.  Created in 2002, Orogenesis cannot match up-to-date Hollywood CG landscapes – though I’m not quite sure just what I’m saying there, since both are entirely in the hyper-real bracket! So what is the benchmark?

Constellations

This is an earlier body of work that, again, does not involve the use of a camera.  Claiming to be a keen amateur astronomer, Fontcuberta has ‘depicted the night sky’.  The key word here is ‘depicted’.  It isn’t the night sky at all but, according to a passing comment in another exhibition film, mosquitos and other insects splattered on the screen of a car.  He doesn’t explain exactly how the images are produced, but presumably it is some form of photogram.  The most interesting aspect for me, again, was the presentation.  Quite large scale images, principally black, with spots and splashes of white, were hung either side of a dimly lit space, and I was immediately reminded of Sugimoto’s monumental ‘sideways’ landscapes in Arles 2013, where the scale, muted black and white tones, and dimmed lighting produced something akin to a religious experience.  Fontcuberta hadn’t quite achieved that, but he was, I think, appropriating and subverting the style.

Sirens

This section is based on the history of another mysterious ‘historical’ character – Father Jean Fontana – who discovered, whilst living and teaching in the Southern French Alps in 1947, the fossilised remains of an extinct (mythical?) creature called Hydropithecus alpinus, half monkey, half fish.  Fontcuberta, has been hired by National Geologic (sic) magazine to do a photographic study of what is now a ‘World Heritage Site’.  There is a life-size plaster cast of one of the perfectly preserved skeletons, in a glass case, surrounded by large-scale, full colour prints of the site and the fossils.  Camera angles, compositions, use of focus etc, all copy the ‘fine art’ style of such ‘real’ magazine photography – albeit somewhat self-consciously.  There are other artefacts associated with Father Fontana, in glass cases, a ‘mock-up’ of the feature as it appeared in ‘National Geologic’, and a documentary film that would site perfectly comfortably on one of the dozens of documentary TV channels – apart from the occasional surreally gauche moment that just keeps everything on the ‘wrong’ side of ‘truth’.  This was, perhaps, the most complete of the fictions, with less text than, say, Fauna, and was probably the best section of all, for me.  It brings home, again, the importance of ‘completeness’ in presenting fictions, including a ‘back story’.  I have been debating how to use the ‘back stories’ with my own Portraits series and this exhibition has convinced me that I should give serious consideration to their inclusion in quite an overt way.

Karelia, Miracles & Co

Gallery fatigue was, I admit, beginning to set in by this stage.  This is a series that I had probably given most pre-attention to – given the use of the ‘self-portrait’ – but I found it the least satisfying in the exhibition.  Great fun, of course, and delightfully ‘delivered’, but erring a little towards the ‘daft’.  Of course, this could well have been deliberate, since there is a kind of double-bluff going on here.  The monastery in Karelia that supposedly trains monks to perform miracles is being visited by an investigative journalist and photographer, Joan Fontcuberta, posing as a novice monk.  So, the outcome, given that this journalist has set out to expose the monastery as a fraud, has a deliberate agenda to make things look ‘daft’.  So Fontcuberta is certainly not sending up the monastery and its miracles but he is questioning the approach of the investigative press, with their preconceived ideas and their tendency to look more for spectacle and entertainment than for ‘truth’.

So, a well-presented and thought-provoking exhibition that has helped me understand the quality, thoroughness and sheer creativity of Fontcuberta’s work.  It was inspiring and informative for my Body of Work, giving me confidence, particularly, with the Portraits series.

In the context of my ‘Self-Portraits’, it was useful to visit the David Bailey ‘Stardust’ exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery on Sunday.  Bailey isn’t a photographer who comes in for much close examination in the realms of academia (so far as I know) but he is a significant creator of images in popular visual culture in the second half of the 20th century – and I have chosen to use his ‘style’ for one of my first self-portraits.  There were no great surprises in this extensive presentation of his work; I had seen a TV preview with Bailey himself (who also curated the exhibition), so pretty much knew what to expect.  It is, though, interesting to see the ‘documentary’ work that he has done in, for example, India and Papua New Guinea, alongside the celebrity and fashion images, for which he is best known.

The aspect on which I feel most keen to comment is the ‘hanging’ and, in particular, what I can only describe as ‘display walls’.  It is the tendency to hang images high on the wall, which I also noted at some the Paris exhibitions last month, that fascinates me.  This ‘family wall’, chiefly featuring photographs of his wife, Catherine, is the best example.

THESE IMAGES ARE NOT MEANT TO BE LOOKED AT!

It is physically impossible for anyone to look at most of the photographs on this wall and so the only conclusion is that he does not want us to look at them closely. (I might say, in passing, that the larger prints in some of the other rooms were also well above natural eye-level, for an averagely tall person.)  One can only step back, as I did in taking this photograph, and stare at the ‘spectacle of the display’.  I am tempted to compare this approach to the barrage of visual images we see every day online and in publications – individual images are ‘devalued’ by the impact of quantity, so that it becomes impossible to actually ‘read’ anything from them.  In this case, I would suggest that they neither say anything individually nor as a series.  It’s more like something done by an interior designer than an an exhibition of photographs.

In the Sky Arts interview referred to previously, Bailey pays tribute to Catherine, his wife and muse, so, speculating about Bailey’s purpose in presenting them like this, I tend towards the idea that he sees the ‘spectacle’ as a kind of physical and visual tribute, an expression of pride in his family perhaps.  The room is specifically titled ‘Catherine Bailey’.  However, it is not a style unique to this show.  There was evidence of the same approach in both the Cartier-Bresson and Mapplethorpe exhibitions in Paris.  And whilst that might lead one to think of it as a modernist trope, glorifying the images display, I then recall that it also happened in the more contemporary context of the Ponte City exhibition at Le Bal.  As I say, ‘spectacle’ is the word that keeps coming to mind – impressing with the overall impact rather than homing into either individual images or, say, the narrative of a series.

So, it was particularly interesting to compare the same approach again, next day, at Tate Modern, but in a rather different context.

These are street posters from the Russian Revolution.  They are specifically about display and propaganda, of course; about creating an impression rather than passing on information or illustrating something specific.  They are also intended to be viewed from afar.  So the overall impression of style and colour comes together well in these big, multiple displays, which cover three walls of a single room.  I am, I have to say, rather less convinced by the effectiveness of the ‘wall-filling’ approach when used for 40-or-so smallish black & white framed prints on a high wall at the NPG.

Les Invalides lies just over the Pont Alexandre III from the Grand Palais, where a major exhibition of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe was on show, and very close to Rue Varenne, location of the Rodin Museum, where there was a corresponding exhibition comparing the works of Mapplethorpe and Rodin.  I was able to see both last week – another experience that left me with a sense of privilege.

Mapplethorpe’s work isn’t always easy to deal with, of course.  There has never been any problem with his images of flowers and his studies of the human body are highly respected – hence the Rodin comparison – but when he moves into the erotic and exotic, it may not always be comfortable viewing.  Though, actually, these exhibitions have largely changed my view on that point.  In this video on the Grand Palais website, his long-time friend and collaborator, Patti Smith, says that he sought to raise the sexual and erotic to the status of ‘art’ – putting flowers, the body, genitalia on an even footing.  Avoiding for now any debates about what might comprise ‘art, this exhibition demonstrates that he succeeded.  A hugely-printed quote, early in the Grand Palais show, has Mapplethorpe adoring and in awe of the human body; another has him seeking perfection in form.  The latter is clear from the exceptional quality of the prints on show in both exhibitions.  It is through the strenuous application and maintenance these very, very high aesthetic standards that he enables us to look at, and even respect, subject matter that we might otherwise struggle with.  It confirms, for all of us, the importance of setting such high standards and striving always for the very best in presentational quality.  (Something that fellow student, Amano, and I observed to be rather less in evidence at another exhibition we visited, described by him here.)

In the Mapplethorpe-Rodin comparison, I found myself making some value judgements about the sculptor versus the photographer – a meaningless exercise in the end, but an interesting opportunity to make such comparison across media.  The basic reaction, I think, is to sense that creating a meaningful, three-dimensional form that speaks very clearly about the human body, forming it ‘hands-on’ from some basic material and an empty piece of space, that is probably a greater challenge than using the medium of a ‘machine’ to create a two-dimensional photographic image.  But then, to create a sense of ‘real’ three-dimensional form on a flat surface, with a true impression of form and texture, that too is a challenge, whatever the medium.  It doesn’t greatly matter, as I say, but looking at the two, side-by-side inevitably leads to those thoughts.  The curators used a number of areas of comparison in order to give the exhibition structure – black & white; highlighting of detail; texture; use of drapery; assemblage; erotic/sexual content being some of the key ones.  The notes in the leaflet accompanying the Grand Palais exhibition describes Mapplethorpe as “A sculptor at heart …” and an “Admirer of Michaelangelo …” who “… championed the classical ideal …”.  So much is clear from these shows; and one feels that he would have been delighted to see his work on display in these grand surroundings and directly compared to Rodin.

One aspect that was of particular interest to me, in the context of my Body of Work was Mapplethorpe’s Self Portraits.  There were several, scattered around both exhibitions, as they are ‘scattered’ through his lifetime.  I enjoyed the sense of ‘performance’ in them – certainly exploring different sides of his character, but with a sense of wit and performance nonetheless – even the 1988 one that featured in the Grand Palais publicity and posters, taken when he knew that death was unlikely to be far away.  And there was a direct parallel in one of the exhibitions running alongside the Martin Parr at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie – Luciano Castelli.  More colourful and flamboyant than the Mapplethorpe’s, perhaps, but very much of the same era.  Which provides an opportunity to mention another Mapplethorpe quote from the Grand Palais, that he “… looked to photograph the world and its curiosities … what was New York at that time … it couldn’t have been done anywhere else …”.

The Pompidou Centre was featuring a major exhibition of another great photographer of his time – Henri Cartier-Bresson.  I had already seen a big presentation of his work at the National Media Museum, in Bradford, some years ago – Scrapbook: Photographs 1932-46 – so a lot of the work on show was familiar.  There is no doubting Cartier-Bresson’s enormous contribution to the development of Photography, as art and in documentary/photojournalistic terms, and this exhibition explored it to the fullest extent – adding painting & drawing plus later photo-journalistic work & contextual material to the images I’d seen previously.  I probably prefer the earlier, more art-based work myself, but some of the material presented in relation to his work for the communist newspaper, Ce Soir, was interesting.

This collection (note the high hanging again!) is of features about ‘lost children’.  It all seems have been a bit of a ‘set-up’, whereby the newspaper miraculously and joyously re-unites the children with their parents.  There is nothing new in the world of journalism, clearly.  There is a famous Cartier-Bresson photograph taken in Moscow in 1954, which is featured in this Guardian article.  It was interesting to see, in the Pompidou Centre exhibition, examples of range of magazines and journals in which it subsequently featured.  So, this is an extensive presentation of Cartier-Bresson, his work, and the context – well worth the visit.

There was one element that ‘wound me up’ (not always too difficult these days, I admit).  Most Cartier-Bresson shows would, rightly, feature his photographs taken in the UK in 1937, when he was commissioned (by Ce Soir again, I think) to cover the coronation of King George VI.  He famously took many photographs of the crowd and few, if any, of the royalty.  This was the English translation of the text that accompanied some of these images in the exhibition at the Pompidou Centre:

Watching the king go by

In May 1937, Cartier-Bresson was sent to London by the Communist daily newspaper Ce Soir to photograph the coronation of George VI. The pictures he took showed not the new monarch but people looking at him. The photographer was particularly interested by the devices for aiding vision used by the spectators. Here it is important to understand that these optic devices, ranging from a simple mirror tied to the end of a stick to the most sophisticated periscopes, obliged the viewers to turn their backs on the king to see him as he went by. In the Sixties and Seventies, Michel Foucault showed how far the positioning of bodies in space and the use of optical devices led to situations of power. In 1937, Cartier-Bresson had already grasped this entirely. By photographing the people’s about turn, he envisaged the overthrow of power. This is what gives his pictures an eminently revolutionary value.

Without doing more research into what Cartier-Bresson himself might have said about the images, I can’t be sure; but does one feel that the writer is trying to make rather more of these documentary/journalistic images than they warrant by suggesting they preempted Foucault; and which particular overthrow of power is being envisaged?  As I say, I am easily wound-up these days!