There's a wonderful article about Japanese photobook designer Kohei Sugiura over at the ICP Library blog, talking, amongst others, about my favourite photobook The Map (Chizu) by Kikuji Kawada (my vdeo presentation is here).
]]>
There's a wonderful article about Japanese photobook designer Kohei Sugiura over at the ICP Library blog, talking, amongst others, about my favourite photobook The Map (Chizu) by Kikuji Kawada (my vdeo presentation is here).
]]>
As far as I can tell Julia Hetta's photographs are all commissioned work. There are many gems here - make sure to look through the whole set!
]]>I don't want to spend this anniversary year navel-gazing. There is a lot of talk about blogs ("are blogs dead?") or about photography criticism ("is photo criticism dead?") or about whether or not the internet is making us all stupid. These debates might or might not have merit. But instead of worrying about any of those questions I made the decision to ignore them, to simply produce content on photography.
After working on Conscientious for ten years, I now have a bit of a vested interest in it: I want to make sure the site is as good and as interesting as I can make it. The blog was started at a time when I had a lot of trouble finding information about photographers online. It was frustrating. So I decided to compile such information, in the hope that other people would find it useful. With time I then added other types of content that, I thought, were good to have. The reader survey has provided invaluable input in terms of where to go, what to do. Again: Thank you for your input!
PS: Many more people than expected left their contact information in the survey. I started looking at the responses, but I have not contacted anyone, yet.
]]>
I'll Die For You is a project by Laura El-Tantawy about the many thousands of Indian farmers who committed suicide over the past decade.
]]>
(The first in what probably is going to become a new feature.) If someone asked you what photography's big deal was, all you'd have to say is that it has something to do with "the gaze," and then show this photograph. Of course, photography is not just this image. There is a lot more - or, if you're a curmudgeon (there seem to be many these days) a lot less. But there is a lot to be said for talking about the most outstanding examples of any art form to get an idea of their power - instead of focusing on the detritus. Thus, when talking about photography we'd probably want to talk about photographs of the human form, and out of all those we might want to talk about this particular photograph. Its title is "A woman sits for a final photograph with her dying mother," and it was taken by Eduard Méhomé (the photograph can be found on page 41 of Life & Afterlife in Benin). Find the full article here.
A good eye for symmetry requires a good eye for asymmetry. Just the right amount of asymmetry, just the right amount of confusion will make any symmetric photography much better: It truly brings a photograph to life. Georg Aerni's Promising Bay is a perfect example.
]]>
In Sochi, every "self-respecting restaurant has a singer," The Sochi Project's Sochi Singers notes (I'll try to limit the use of the word "Sochi" in the following sentences, I promise; this and all following quotes are taken from their website). The city is a tourist resort ("The smell of sunscreen, sweat, alcohol and roasting meat pervades the air."), and of course restaurants have to be competitive. The level of cheerfulness that is - presumably - the intended result of the singing escapes me: "Chansons are Russian ballads, but the comparison with French chansons is only partial. The songs have their origins in the age-old Russian tradition of labour camps and prisons." And: "nowadays the term 'chanson' more often refers to the saccharine genre of Russian-language dance music. It is usually accompanied by a heavy disco beat and occasionally even a dash of techno." Labour camps to a disco beat: I don't want to know what that sounds like. (more)
Sochi Singers is a rather large book, but you need the size to be able to see what's actually going on. Everything that is relevant for the stage/singer is contained in the frames. You will find yourself studying the images, looking at all the various things on or next to the stage. The singers often look directly at the camera while doing their job - so there is that additional element of almost being there.
In the crudest sense of the word, the photographs of the singers (there are some photos of Sochi beaches in the book, too) are shot as a typology. But applying the idea of a typology really takes away from the fun that you'll have looking at this book (I bet you haven't seen the words "typology" and "fun" used all that much in the same sentence, have you?). Mind you, the book is not making fun of these singers. They are presented as what they are, and the text that comes along the photographs provides the necessary background.
With a focus on a very troubled region, The Sochi Project's attention to something that is very much part of that region, but that is not part of any sort of trouble (other than the audible kind), shows that hard-hitting documentary work can indeed be combined with something that is lighter fare. This doesn't mean that things always need to be light. But adding something like the cheesy singers in Sochi restaurants to the many other more troubling aspects of the region shows that what is happening there - and everywhere else - is multi-faceted: Our simplistic ideas of "this is good" and "this is bad" too often miss a more complex picture that, let's face it, we are very familiar with from our own lives.
Sochi Singers, photographs by Rob Hornstra, essay by Arnold van Bruggen, 80 pages, The Sochi Project, 2011
]]>
I have a bit of a weakness for photographic depictions of messy places - such as those in Gustavo Sanabria's Talat Noi.
]]>
As a photographer, you won't get around bringing your desire to photography, just as a viewer you do the same thing. You have no choice. As I have argued before, photography must fail if that desire is denied. But desire does not automatically create good photography. An equally crucial factor is trust. As a photographer, you have to trust your photographs. You have to trust that they say what you want them to say. Or more accurately, you have to realize that your subconscious mind is bringing more things to photography than your conscious mind might realize. Continued here.
]]>
This is an image from Ulrich Lebeuf's extended portrait Tropique du Cancer, for which, alas, information is hard to come by.
]]>In fact, that's a situation everybody is used to: If you want to buy a car and the car costs $15,000 while you only have $14,000, you don't decide not to buy any car. You will probably find a car that fits your budget. If you want to go on vacation, and your planned vacation would cost $1,000 while you only have $800, most people I know would make it work with $800: Go for fewer days, or stay at a cheaper hotel or whatever option there is.
Insisting on an all-or-nothing funding model essentially is an unnecessary simplification of what crowdfunding could really be. Why not instead work with two numbers, the amount of money the photographer wants to raise and the minimum amount of money that needs to be raised for the project to be possible at all? For the above example, that could be $5,000 and $4,000, say. You figure you'd really need $5,000 for your road trip, but you could cut some expenses and do the whole thing, in a somewhat reduced form, for less. Or maybe you want to photograph 50 people, but you could also just photograph 40. Or instead of producing 300 books you'd produce 200.
This would probably increase the numbers of successful pitches quite a bit, Kickstarter would make extra money (for them it's a business, a way to make money), and it would give people more flexibility - both backers and photographers.
Of course, you could argue that if someone could do their project for $4,000 why don't then then ask for just that? But that misses the point. When you budget your project, you want to budget it properly. You want to budget the project you want to do. Once you have that number you could then think about what number you could still work with - if the full amount doesn't come through. Or you could even decide that if you raise $4,000 instead of the $5,000 you'd put the remaining $1,000 on a credit card.
Your potential backers would see the numbers, and they could base their decision on that. If someone asks for $5,000, but could also work with $4,000 (to do something a little reduced) that seems to make a lot of sense. In contrast, if someone asks for $5,000, but could also work with $2,000 - I'd probably think twice before funding that.
This is what one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the lighthouse of Alexandria looks like today - or more accurately, this is what the scene looks like, since it's gone. Find the rest of the wonders in Hans Engels' The Seven Wonders.
]]>
This is an image from Youngsuk Suh's Wildfires - a series of landscapes with the fires only present in the form of a diffuse smoke.
]]>You'd imagine that if you give people what they give you money for that should be enough. But I actually don't think that's how this really works. Let's say you need $1,000 to produce something, so you "do a Kickstarter," and you say that if someone gives you $50 they'll get whatever it is you want to produce. Let's say you find all those people, you send out a thank-you email, spend some weeks on producing whatever it is you want to do, and then you send it out to your supporters. That's my friend's experience. It's essentially just a slightly more unusual way of shopping, isn't it? You prepay, and then you get your product. I don't think that's a good approach to crowdfunding.
At the very least, approaching crowdfunding that way is a lost opportunity. After all, if people are interested enough to give you money don't you want to make sure that those same people might give you money again in the future? Wouldn't that be nice? In other words, wouldn't you want to give them the feeling that your project is not just some shopping experience?
Isn't this problem essentially the same problem you face as a photographer with your images? There are thousands and thousands of other photographers out there - how do you differentiate yourself? Let's be realistic, unless (until) you're famous your photographs are probably not going to be enough. You have to do some PR. But you need to do the PR smartly so that you won't be yet another person sending out an email that's little more than "Hey, look at my website!"
Crowdfunding is more complex than that: When you have a funded project, people are already - literally and emotionally - invested in you. As with any investment, you want to make sure your supporter's return-on-investment is maximized. Giving them what they paid for is good. But you want to give them more. Treat the people who supported your work not as customers, but as patrons - patrons in the old sense of the work. Think of them not as current supporters but as potential future supporters.
Thus, make sure to communicate with them about whatever it is you do. Send them updates, and make sure the updates are meaningful and don't feel like a chore. The more engaged you are with your supporters, the more you give them the feeling they're not just convenient cash cows for you.
In a nutshell, I see crowdfunding as bringing the idea of patronage to the web. There is an element of commerce involved, but the crucial aspect is not the commerce. Instead, it's the relationships artists can establish with their supporters. Artists need those relationships. In the past, these kinds of relationships were usually established with wealthy collectors only. Now, crowdfunding offers the chance to establish them with a much larger, much more diverse, much more democratic group of people. Artists ignore this aspect of crowdfunding at their own peril!
Well, well, well. A Swedish photographer, Gerry Johansson, might have made the most poignant book about the economic distress many American cities (and regions) find themselves in: Pontiac. The book operates in the same way the setting of the movie Ghost Dog works: It looks like an American city, but it could be almost any American city. Of course, Pontiac is a real town in Michigan. You get all the vital statistics right after the book's title page. But Johansson photographs it so that it becomes any of those American cities whose unemployment rate has quadrupled from 2000 to 2010, any of those American cities that have about a quarter of their families living below poverty level. (more)
But the work you need to put into the book is well worth it. For a start, the photographs are amazing. They are often very simple, created with careful attention to detail. You'll start finding things, finding clues what might be going on, and these clues are then connected to other clues in the book. With the locations of the photographs given underneath them, you are taken on a walk around town, a walk that for the most part does not run into other people. There are less than a handful images in the book that have humans in them - in those, the humans are small, anonymous. It's almost as if Pontiac were a ghost town.
Unlike many other books about these kinds of town, Pontiac doesn't seem to focus on one aspect at all. You get to see everything, from the inner city to the old and new suburbs, the churches, parking garages. It's all there. There is a very clear and smart artistic agenda, but there is no obvious political agenda. The more often you look at the book, the more things you discover. It makes you think, but before it does that it makes you feel something. Highly recommended.
Pontiac, Photographs by Gerry Johansson, 64 pages, Mack, 2011
(find my presentation of the book here)
