Who’s that girl?

Untitled (2010) (c) Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman was in the news this weekend, with reviews of her current show in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and elsewhere.

Says Simon Hattenstone in Saturdays Guardian,

I give Cindy Sherman the once-over. Then the twice- and thrice-over. I know I’m staring more than is right but I can’t help myself. I’m looking for clues. Sherman is one of the world’s leading artists – for 30 years, she has starred in all her photographs – and yet the more we see of her, the less recognisable she is.

She’s a Hitchcock heroine, a busty Monroe, an abuse victim, a terrified centrefold, a corpse, a Caravaggio, a Botticelli, a mutilated hermaphrodite sex doll, a man in a balaclava, a surgically-enhanced Hamptons type, a cowgirl, a desperate clown, and we’ve barely started.

Read the full interview here

If you happen to find yourself in London between now and Feb 19th, the Sprüth Magers gallery (7A Grafton Street, W1S 4EJ) would be well worth seeking out.

– Rory

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 36,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.

 

In 2010, there were 92 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 228 posts. There were 257 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 46mb. That’s about 5 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was October 28th with 330 views. The most popular post that day was A Short History of Photography at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery Week 1.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, corkap.blogspot.com, eksisozluk.com, twitter.com, and awards.ie.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for daguerre, daguerreotype, mathew brady, david lachapelle, and silk cut.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

A Short History of Photography at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery Week 1 October 2009
4 comments

2

A Short History of Photography at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Week 3 October 2009

3

A Short History of Photography at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery Week 2 October 2009
2 comments

4

Irving Penn October 2009

5

August Sander, The Father of Street Photography June 2010
7 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

 

The above summary was emailed from wordpress, which our blog is hosted on. Thanks to all our readers and all the best for 2011. Take lotsa photos!

 

– Rory

Jackie Nickerson Artist’s Talk – CIT 11th March 2010. Part # 2

By Miriam King

From "Faith" by Jackie Nickerson

Part # 1 of this post is here

From "Faith" by Jackie Nickerson

A little while later Jackie met her husband, who is Irish, and moved to live in Ireland. It was at a time when the Catholic Church was constantly in the news, with scandal after scandal coming to light. She had decided at this stage that she wanted to be an artist, and once again she wanted to use photography to explore the country and society now lived in, particularly the Catholic Church she was hearing and reading so much about.

This time she spent a very difficult year researching renaissance painting, iconography and Byzantine art. It was almost impossible to get permission to photograph any of the religious orders as they were suspicious of being portrayed in a bad light. Eventually one closed order allowed her in. She sat and watched the nuns, wondering what it was that gave them the faith to lead this kind of life. The project moved away from the political situation and even the Catholic Church in particular, to the question of individual faith.

She photographed the everyday institutional life of the nuns using the traditional colours and symbolism of Renaissance painting. These photos were published in the book ‘Faith’.

Ten Miles Round

From "Ten Miles Round" by Jackie Nickerson

When Jackie and her husband originally moved to Ireland they lived in Dalkey (a small town on the edge of Dublin) but then they made the move to an extremely rural area in Co. Louth. She knew that for her next project she wanted to stay at home in her local community. She began to build up a picture of the area by collecting photos of familiar images that were already in her head; the pothole outside the local shop, the telegraph pole that was falling down that she drove past every day.
Initially she decided to leave aesthetic aside and use her brain instead of her eye to begin the project. The aesthetic came to her when she came across an early Van Gogh painting in a museum in Amsterdam. She instantly recognised the Northern European monotone shades of cyan and grey, with a little red peeping through, and realised that was the aesthetic she wanted.
Next she began to photograph people in the community. She was allowed to use the waiting room of the local Credit Union as a studio. At the start she had to intercept people coming out of the shop and persuade them to sit for her, but word quickly went around that she would take your photograph for free! Then she began to go into peoples homes, photographing interiors as well.
She explained that you have to know what you’re aiming at and what it is you want to communicate with the audience. She wanted to tell the story of the people in a community and of an area that was wild, chaotic and untamed and she used the landscape photos of hedges & grey skies and the portraits and interior photos to communicate this.
She also said that the advantage of photography as an art form is that it is far more accessible to people than other forms of contemporary art. People are used to seeing photographs all around them every day, in advertising, magazines & newspapers and so they are more willing and able to read art photographs.

From "Ten Miles Round" by Jackie Nickerson

Jackie ended the talk by saying something that I really love, “If you know how to look at things you can begin to understand them”. I think that was one of the things that really came through from listening to her speak was that her photography was very personal to her. She used it time and again to explore and make sense of her environment and her life. I found it inspiring and fascinating to hear her speak about her life and her creative process.

– Miriam

‘Photographs’ an Exhibition by Jackie Nickerson continues in the Sirius Art Centre in Cobh until Thursday, April 1^st.

Images from Une Nouveau Ideal,

Brancolini Grimaldi Gallery

& Highlanes Gallery

<!–[if !mso]> <! st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } –>

When Jackie and her husband originally moved to Ireland they lived in Dalkey (a small town on the edge of Dublin) but then they made the move to an extremely rural area in Co. Louth. She knew that for her next project she wanted to stay at home in her local community. She began to build up a picture of the area by collecting photos of familiar images that were already in her head; the pothole outside the local shop, the telegraph pole that was falling down that she drove past every day.

Initially she decided to leave aesthetic aside and use her brain instead of her eye to begin the project. The aesthetic came to her when she came across an early Van Gogh painting in a museum in Amsterdam. She instantly recognised the Northern European monotone shades of cyan and grey, with a little red peeping through, and realised that was the aesthetic she wanted.

Next she began to photograph people in the community. She was allowed to use the waiting room of the local Credit Union as a studio. At the start she had to intercept people coming out of the shop and persuade them to sit for her, but word

Uh oh – Impossible Project impossible?

Impossible?

This image is one taken by the British Journal of Phototgraphy using the Impossible Project’s new “polaroid” film. It’s the best of the lot that they got from their press pack. Oops. Doesn’t look good. Read the BJP article here.

Could be a problem with an early production pack, but I won’t be parting with any cash for this stuff yet. Pity …

– Rory

Jackie Nickerson Artist’s Talk – CIT 11th March 2010. Part # 1

By Miriam King

From "Farm" by Jackie Nickerson

On the 11^th March a group of students, artists and photographers gathered in the Rory Gallagher lecture theatre to hear Jackie Nickerson speak. She spoke about her background as a fashion photographer and her subsequent life as an art photographer, telling us the story of her three successful projects so far, in a talk that I found fascinating and inspiring.

Fashion

Jackie began by telling us about the first camera she was ever given when she was about 12 years old. It was a Kodak instamatic and she ran straight outside to take photos of the trees, using up her first roll of film within minutes. That was the moment that she connected with her passion.

She continued to take photographs throughout her teenage years and learned to work in a darkroom and make black & white prints. When she didn’t get into the only course she wanted to do after school, she flew to New York at age 18 because that was where all the great photographers were. Over a period of 5 years she took any job going to gain experience. Then she moved to Milan to start up as a fashion photographer herself. Later she lived in London and worked for all the big fashion magazines of the 90s; Marie Claire, Elle, The Face, Wallpaper etc.

She showed us a series of photographs from some of these shoots. She commented that fashion photography at the time was more pure and simple than it is now, there was less fantasy and less retouching. She liked to put her own stamp on fashion shoots, keeping hair & make-up simple and preferring to photograph clothes that she herself would wear, like Comme des Garcon & Yohji Yamamoto. She liked the character of the model to shine through, so that there was an element of portraiture in her work.

Farm

From "Farm" by Jackie Nickerson

From "Farm" by Jackie Nickerson

Eventually Nickerson became dissatisfied with fashion photography and when an opportunity came up to go on holidays to Africa with a friend she went, and ended up staying for 3 years. When she first arrived she was completely burnt out and had given up photography altogether. She was living in a cottage on a farm in Zimbabwe, but over time she began to feel uncomfortable with the separation between the white farm owners and the black farm workers.

From "Farm" by Jackie Nickerson

She finally picked up the camera again to try and understand and connect with the place she was living. At first she went out into the bush with her Leica Rangefinder and took black & white photos of branches and trees. Then she progressed to photographing the farm and village, but she felt her photos were very much the ‘standard’ photos of Africans as poor victims, which was not how she felt or what she wanted to portray. She admired Africans and felt they had a freedom and happiness that she didn’t have. So she moved on to taking still life photos and realised that her background in fashion photography meant that her strength was in attention to detail. So she started to take portraits linking the land with the people. After photographing the people on the farm and in the surrounding areas she bought a truck and travelled around Africa, to Mozambique and South Africa, photographing people until she had to leave Zimbabwe and move back to London.

One more crucial step in the process relates back to a time, as a fashion photographer, when she had tea with Henri Cartier Bresson in his apartment on the Rue de Rivoli (lucky girl!) and he told a story about Matisse, when they both were on holidays in the South of France. Matisse said to Cartier-Bresson that he had it easy photographing in black and white, colour was far more difficult because the bright sunlight kills colour. She remembered this and realised that the bright sun in South Africa did the same. For example the sky is not really blue but cyan. So you have to look with your brain and not your eyes to see what colours are actually in real life.

When she returned to London she had no ambition to become an art photographer. The photographs sat in a drawer for over a year until her printer introduced her to an agent who offered her a book deal. The book is simply called ‘Farm’.

– Miriam

Part 2 coming soon!

‘Photographs’ an Exhibition by Jackie Nickerson continues in the Sirius Art Centre in Cobh until Thursday, April 1^st.

Images from Une Nouveau Ideal,

Brancolini Grimaldi Gallery

& Highlanes Gallery

Les Rencontres d’Arles 2009

Beyond life’s dark edges … Nan and Brian in the bed, 1983, part of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

“One of the reasons I supported and like all the photographers in the show I’ve curated,” writes Nan Goldin, in her catalogue introduction to the 40th Arles photography festival, “is that they seek to express their own truths.”

Those truths tend to be of the hard-hitting variety: the photograph as a record of survival, a testament to – and defiance of – the darkness that often attends lives lived beyond the boundaries of so-called normal society. Goldin’s most celebrated work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, is an epic semi-autobiographical narrative of survival, part installation, part ever-evolving stills-based film. It has become a touchstone for those who seek to lay bare their lives with a camera. …. read more by clicking here

From last Sunday’s Observer

– Rory

Kodak took our Kodachrome away

Sharbat Gula, Afghan Girl, at Nasir Bagh refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan, 1984.

(C) Steve Curry, shot on Kodachrome

ROCHESTER, N.Y., June 22 — Eastman Kodak Company announced today that it will retire KODACHROME Color Film this year, concluding its 74-year run as a photography icon.

Sales of KODACHROME Film, which became the world’s first commercially successful color film in 1935, have declined dramatically in recent years as photographers turned to newer KODAK Films or to the digital imaging technologies that Kodak pioneered. Today, KODACHROME Film represents just a fraction of one percent of Kodak’s total sales of still-picture films.

“KODACHROME Film is an iconic product and a testament to Kodak’s long and continuing leadership in imaging technology,” said Mary Jane Hellyar, President of Kodak’s Film, Photofinishing and Entertainment Group. “It was certainly a difficult decision to retire it, given its rich history. However, the majority of today’s photographers have voiced their preference to capture images with newer technology – both film and digital. Kodak remains committed to providing the highest-performing products – both film and digital – to meet those needs.”

Read on here

Book Review – Alexey Titarenko Photographs

I first came across Alexey Titarenko a few years ago when he was exhibited in the Sirius Arts Center in Cobh. His photographs, many of which exhibited at that time also appear in the book “Alexey Titarenko Photographs”, stuck me immediately because of the conveyed feeling of life, movement, and the organic filling of the stark city backdrop with humanity. More than most photographers, Titarenko is able to make the city seem alive because of the people living in it. The photographs were taken in St. Petersburg (or Leningrad as it was then) from 1986 onwards – back in the Iron Curtain days. The symbols of communism are stark – giant statues of Lenin, signs depicting messages from The Party, and the overall drab greyness of the city.

And yet it is the movement of the people, the life, that stands out so much in so many of the photographs. The one above, from “The City of Shadows” series is one such photograph. Normally a photograph shows the briefest moment in time – a snapshot. The buildings in the background are such – sharp, motionless, caught in a snap. But on the steps are the blurred motions of people climbing. A greath faceless swath of people swarming upwards, only the odd hand paused on the rail indicating that this is a crowd of people at all. Titarenko has not so much stopped time, but grabbed a chunk of time and paused it, stretched in a blur of movement and mystery. Titarenko says, “In my work, I try to introduce a third dimension, that of time, which adds an element of continuity and narration… I attempt to transpose time into a purely visual language” **

What really draws me to Titarenko’s work however is the sheer beauty of it. The framing, the composition, the printing. Many of the photographs have a painterly dimension, with great swaths of movement. I would love an Alexey Titarenko print hanging on my wall

– Rory

**Artistis Credo, 9 April, 2001

5b4 review Chris Killip “Here comes everybody”

Photography book review site 5B4 have reiewed Manx photographer Chris Killips new book of  photographs of the annual pilgrimages at Croagh Patrick and Maamean. “Here Comes Everybody” features photographs taken over several visits between 1993 and 2005.

“… Killip’s discovery of landscape and tradition is felt throughout. Fences of loose rock piled to delineate property or path are described with the same eye towards beauty as the pastoral views and fog shrouded mountain tops. His pilgrims ascend in small groups and pause in a landscape so idyllic that they teeter on the purely romantic. This is where his construction and sequencing become the most important element holding this book together. His juxtaposition of black and white and color slyly keep us jumping back and forth from past to present, from old tradition to new, preconception and reality. His penitents in their misty struggle upwards are faced on opposite pages with clarity and heavenly crisp light. ‘A fiction about metaphor’ as he has said of past projects is at work here too.  …”

Read more at 5B4 here

– Rory