John Baldessari

Cool, funny, cerebral, sardonic, provocative.

Leicester Belgrave Road

Here are some images from a recent trip to Leicester's Belgrave Road; the heart of the Indian Gujarati community there and an occasional destination for some decent groceries and snacks. The trip was to recce the area for remnants of East Africa within a post-colonial community.

John Smith - The Girl Chewing Gum (1976)

A self-reflexive and inadvertently funny film by British avant garde filmmaker John Smith.

The Hotel Pension-Funk, Berlin

This hotel in the Charlottenburg area of Berlin was once home to a Danish silent movie actress. Her name was Asta Neilsen and working in European cinema between 1910 and 1936, she has been recognized as one of the first international movie stars. She occupied this building between 1931 and 1937 and the hotel still retains some of her original decor and many of the original art nouveau features of the building.  Inside, the atmosphere is thick, with a haunting of Berlin's history, not of its post-war, cold war history but as a modern and glamourous European city in the 1920's and 1930's, on the edges of a golden era, from when the city's history would be re-written very differently. 

Uganda Stories

This is a new project. It is based on my family's experience of being forced to leave Uganda in 1972 by Idi Amin's famous expulsion of all asians from the country. The project tracks the lives of various members of my family showing how our future was to be shaped by this event.  It centres around stories told through shared memories highlighting specific events and experiences. Much of this type of history remains hidden from public knowledge and many of the stories now are fading from our own consciousness through time. It will be 40 years this September since our move and this project is an attempt to look back and reflect on our lives, our present locations around the world (spread over four continents) and re-tell the stories. More on this soon.

'Entry visa stamp, September 27th 1972'

'Kalpana, Woodfield, 1976?'

The Forgotten Space

A documentary film by Allan Sekula and Noel Burch. Sekula's dismantled modernist documentary is reassembled here based on his project 'Fish Story'. There is due to be a screening of the film at the Tate Modern on 23rd April after which there will be a full review here. Really looking forward to this one.


The Forgotten Space Trailer from The Forgotten Space on Vimeo.

Brecht on Photojournalism

“The tremendous development of photojournalism has contributed practically nothing to the revelation of the truth about conditions in this world. On the contrary photography, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, has become a terrible weapon against the truth. The vast amount of pictured material that is being disgorged daily by the press and that seems to have the character of truth serves in reality only to obscure the facts. The camera is just as capable of lying as the typewriter” - Bertolt Brecht,1931.

source via Foto8 : From the tenth anniversary issue of A-I-Z magazine in Douglas Kahn, John Heartfield: Art & Mass Media (Tanam Press, New York, 1985) p.64 in Ibid., p.15.

How art works?

This asks 'what really matters?' and at least presents some solutions.

Zarina Bhimji

Zarina Bhimji is an artist whose work is close to my heart. My heart, my family's heart and the hearts of possibly 80,000 other asians who were expelled from Uganda in the latter part of 1972. Idi Amin, the infamous military dictator decreed in the August of that year that all asians should leave the country and hand back all their assets to the Ugandan people after a military coup earlier that year. Amin was the peoples ruler and wanted to correct what he saw as the inequalities of colonial legacy that did the Ugandan people out of what was rightlfully theirs. Of course it is claimed that he asserted his ideas at the expense of thousands of lives, through a rule of terror and tyranny.


My family's presence in this country is as a result of this history. I was 3 years old when we came here. September 27th 1972. All I have are some memories from past recollections, old photographs and family discussion. I can only imagine our life in Uganda through these stories and domestic reminders of how life was before we came to the UK.

copyright Zarina Bhimji, 'Bapa Closed His Heart, It Was Over', 2006, from the series 'Love'

Some of Bhimji's photographs and video work offer an insight into this past. She might not like that though. I went to hear her account of her work today. Although it is a starting point for a sensory and very personal experience of asian life, migration and colonialism, she positions it outside of testimony and documentary. She doesn't want to present the facts of what happened. After all, what are facts? - just an account of a truth. She also maintains that she wants the work to be open-ended and doesnt want to offer an interpretation. I get this. But its difficult for me and maybe other ex-Ugandans to not be immersed emotionally and factually into her imagery based on their own experience. I look at her work and I feel a sense of what I cant remember.

Zarina Bhimji's exhibition is on at the Whitechapel Gallery until 9th March 2012.

Taryn Simon - A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters

Taryn Simon is an artist whose practice typifies a kind of journalistic engagement with documentary photography. Simon’s work has consistently relied on a concept realised through heavy research and systematic ordering and presentation. Her latest work: ‘A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters’ consists of a four year long project of research, documenting and compiling eighteen stories of individuals whose circumstances have affected the fate of their genealogy or bloodlines.

JR - The InsideOut Project

An inspiring project combining 'street art' with photography and more importantly, its direct engagement with the people it depicts and its ability to work outside of the art establishment, and corporate/commercial interests and backing.
More information can be found here and on JR's website here.

Who killed Walter Benjamin?

This is an interesting documentary about the mystery surrounding the death of Walter Benjamin. He was one of the greatest 20th Century multi-disciplinary theorists and his life came to a tragic end in 1940. He had travelled to the small town of Portbou, Spain attempting to escape the Nazis and leave Europe for the US. It shows how the lack of official documentation leaves open questions of what makes legitimate testimony and asks where is the truth?

update 27/01/2012 - Original video removed from Vimeo, so here is the first 10 minutes.

Kefalonia 2

'swimming pool at dawn', Kalokeri Apartments, nr. Fiskardo, Kefalonia

Aaron Schuman on photography and education

I came across this by Aaron Schuman on the Foam 'Whats Next' feature.  Its a refreshing take on a photographic education.


'I think photographic education has reached a crossroads.  One direction leads down the vocational route - whether that's training people to be jobbing photographers or art careerists - and there's a lot a pressure for it to go this way, promoting photography as a commodifiable skill.  The other direction, which I think could be much more promising, is that instead of the focus being on a career in photography, the focus could be on the subject of photography itself.  This medium is rapidly becoming one that parallels the written word in many ways - it's embedding itself within culture, and within digital culture in particular, as an important form of communication, with its own vocabularies and variations, its own visual languages, dialects, grammars, accents, applications, and so on.  But when people choose to study subjects that centre on the written word - Literature, Classics, Philosophy, and so on - their intention is not always to be the next great novelist, philosopher or epic poet; their interested in trying to understand how a particular medium has been used to communicate ideas.  If this approach could be applied to the photographic medium, both in terms of its historical and critical studies and in relation to students' own practice, it could be incredibly liberating.  Instead of it being a discipline, photography could become a fully-fledged subject.  I think that expectations would change dramatically if it was approached in this way, but of course it's scary for institutions to promote a visual medium as something other than 'Art'.  For me, it possesses incredible promise as a subject - just because it's a visual discipline doesn't mean that it has to sit exclusively within a fine-art educational construct or context.' - Aaron Schuman

Jeff Wall in conversation

This conversation coincided with the launch of a new book on Wall's 'Picture for Women' by David Campany, published by Afterall. The talk was held at the new Central St. Martins College of Art and Design campus in Kings Cross, a magnificent conversion of what looks like an old textile mill. Wall's equally magnificent work is well known for its groundbreaking effect on art photography and its relationship to the museum. It takes on 19th Century painting's pictorialism in the form of a tableau within the single large format photograph. Walls work represents a turning point for museums adopting photography into the canon of high-art. Pictorialism and photography are often discussed together in the context of early attempts at making photographs look like impressionist paintings, but this pictorialism is concerned with the depiction of a scene, creating an extended narrative or narratives which, in Wall's case are subject to some considerable interpretation.

'Picture for Women', Jeff Wall, 1979.

David Campany's book focuses on the single work that is 'Picture for Women', as the book series is called the 'one work' series. However, in the talk Campany displayed slides and image detail from a range of Wall's works. The carefully selected questions coaxed out from Wall a great deal of information on his thoughts, ideas and processes. Wall definitely comes across as a photographer, I say this because in a lot of conceptual heavy work, there is separation between the act of taking a photograph and the thinking and building processes behind it, such that photographer becomes photographic artist. Wall maintains that his process is simply extended over a long period and that he still makes all the decisions and performs all the work that any photographer might do. He has to select the content, compose, frame, expose, process and print, albeit stretched over a longer period. To reinforce this he stated how Cartier-Bresson's 'decisive moment' is still valid in his process. 

'Mimic', Jeff Wall, 1982

Another thing of note was Wall's attitude to art. He said how it was not important for him to consider an art that satisfied only himself (his ego) or one that was created solely for the viewer. He is only interested in his critical position to art itself, it was only this that allowed him create  what he does - his feelings on "what art should be..". In Wall's work we see his distinct interest in various aspects of contemporary life, moments he discovers and then chooses to transform into images. At the same time, he is creating a fiction with realist medium and yet he claims that as the event has actually happened it is not fiction, implying that there is always something real about a photograph regardless of it being staged. It seems to me that photography is the perfect medium in which Wall can deploy his ideas as it inherently has the paradoxes and ambiguities that he believes should be questioned in art (or photographic art) itself. Its also interesting that how in the 40 years or so his work has been produced it has not changed much in terms of style, process and arguably content, although each of his works are fairly autonomous and have a life of their own. Incredible stuff.

'A woman with a covered tray', Jeff Wall, 2003

'Picture for Woman' by David Campany is published by Afterall Books, 2011. Jeff Wall is currently on show at the White Cube Gallery in Masons Yard, London from November 23rd 2011 to 7th January 2012.

Paris Photo 2011

Paris Photo this year was held in the very grand, Grand Palais in the heart of the Parisian tourist centre. As essentially a photographic art fair primarily concerned with sales, it has the effect of removing photography from the more usual gallery and book setting and highlights the photograph as a very serious, collectable art object. Despite this, the event sits alongside many other smaller shows and fairs which make for an interesting excursion outside of academic work or personal practice. Here are some photos from my iphone:

There were  always lots of people around In Sook Kim's 'Saturday Night' 2007.

From 'Suburbia', Bill Owens

Tereza Vlckova

'Positiv-Negativ', Robert Kusmirowski, 2011

Images of Jupiter taken by Voyager, NASA

Apollo take-off, NASA

Asako Narahashi, from 'Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water', 2003

'Untitled', Jean-Claude Pondevie

'Breath', Tomohide Ikeya, 2008

Liz Hingley, 'Under Gods'

Atsushi Fujiwara

Vincent Fournier, from 'Space Project'

Xavier Veilhan

Xavier Veilhan

William Klein, 'Roma'

from'Nobody belongs to anybody', Rogerio Reis

Kristaq Sotiri

Andrea Graziosi

Walid Raad, from 'Lets be honest the weather helped', 1998-2006

Allan Sekula artist talk

Damn, I recently missed an interview with him at Paris Photo. Here is one from 2009 by The Renaissance Society. His work is introduced well, he discusses camera and frame formats, his relationship to his work, the image text relationship and his project at that time: Polonia and Other Fables.

Allan Sekula Artist Talk from The Renaissance Society on Vimeo.

John Berger quote

"I have said that a photograph bears witness to a human choice being exercised. The choice is not between photographing x and y, but between photographing at x moment or y moment. . . . What varies is the intensity with which we are made aware of the poles of absence and presence. Between these two poles photography finds its proper meaning. ... A photograph, while recording what has been seen, always and by its nature refers to what is not seen. It isolates, preserves and presents a moment taken from a continuum. ... Hence the necessity of our understanding a weapon we can use and which can be used against us." - John Berger

Kefalonia

Morning roadside, nr. Fiskardo, Kefalonia, Greece, September 2011.

Untitled, no.2

Absence of Presence pv video

Video of our recent show produced by Screencult