An aimless walk through Paris Photo 2021, taking in all the sights, being in awe over a lot of them and shuffling through crowds of people.
Stumbling around in a cavernous hall, guarded by a tall bronze statue of a French solider on horseback, no one escapes the steely glare of the Frenchman. Saddled up and ready to gallop after any thieves who think they feel lucky enough to get away with any of these expensive photographs. Because after all, you need something like a 20 feet tall French man on horseback to keep guard at an affair like Paris Photo 2021.
The Grand Palais Éphémere, this gigantic structure of glass and metal which looks like a cross with the bottom half snapped off, a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower, provided the stone be thrown by an Olympic javelinist, was the site for this burgeoning photo festival. Thousands of people wandering through this curved ceiling atrium, this breeding ground for art collectors and exhibitionists. Historians and academics in their tweed suits and thick rimmed glasses halfway down their nose. Neat shoulder length hair over flowing long dresses reinforced with heavy black overcoats with peaked lapels. Students in their checked pants folded above glossy Doc Martens or colour coordinated Chuck Taylors. Bold coloured turtleneck sweaters under even more overcoats and navy-blue parkas. Their hair loosely tied back from their soft, pale wind chafed faces. Beanies barely sitting on top of extremely round heads. This seething mass of overcoats flitting in and out of the hundreds of booths adorned with photographs of every conceivable kind. All of them, under the watchful eye of the metallic Frenchman and his bronze steed.
Ditch your suitcases because there’s no cloakrooms. Sorry. Loud, drooling babies, shrieking their lungs apart while being carried in prams is completely ok with us, but suitcases are where we draw the line monsieur… Try leaving them outside and pray they don’t get stolen.
With that formality out of the way, it’s time to enter the great concourse, and be mindful not to get on the wrong side of the bronze Frenchy. First impressions are very important.
With such a multifarious arrangement of photographs on every wall, there’s bound to be among them some which are just simply banal. Regurgitative. Simple and certainly not effective. Been there, seen that. Ugly. Something that no photographer should ever have to hear about their work, something that really gets under their skin like a crazed rat trapped in a heated bucket pressed against some poor bastard’s stomach.
No such works will be given time here. Only pieces which snapped the eye of the formless voice who is writing this will be the object of this chronicle. Of course, he/she/it could sit here and chronologically review every single booth they walked through, write a few sentences, and move onto the next one, embodying the ephemerality of the image in our lived reality today. //Just hit it and quit it// Although that approach would be encumberingly repetitive and soon enough all parties involved in this would break down from visual fatigue. Instead, all the photographs worth talking about, subjectively speaking (whatever the hell that means to YOU), will be grouped together in these categories…
- Abstract
- Aesthetically Pleasing (quite vague…)
- Classical
- Collage
- Documentary
- Unusual Techniques of Exhibition
- Interphotography, where different practices of photography are bridged
- Physical Alteration of the Image
- Powerful Imagery
- Shadow Play
- Textile (something which is quite in fashion this year)
- And Transcending Traditional Photography
We’ll be here a while.
Abstract
It’s quite self-explanatory. Feelings of shapelessness are pulled out of the eye, composition and order are fed to the dogs and then sicced on the rules. We’re far away from god’s country here. Ruled by chaos, these images are created from scratch, rather than being a reproduction, via the disarray of incalculable moving parts. Two such noteworthy artists fall seamlessly into this category.
A Frenchman who went by the name of Roger Catherineau, channelled Man Ray through the aether and produced some startling works using the photogram, a peculiar little technique which cuts out the camera completely, placing objects directly on some sort of light-sensitive material and then bathing them in a quick burst of light. :FLASH: Leaving behind a sharp negative shadow of the object. Start layering more stuff and :FLASH: you’ve got a two-tone black and white explosion of objects burned onto the paper. Roger’s work is a rejection of depicting reality, finding the image in the random and troubling transformation of something unreferenced. Shadow of a swirling liquid :FLASH: caught in a languid dance. An burlap sack falling apart is :FLASH: transformed into weeds floating in water, or if the mind will go to that dark corner, the fabric of reality unfurling. Many unravelled coils places on the hungry light paper and :FLASH: the eyes are suddenly plummeting towards many concentric whirlpools, unable to make up its little eye-mind which one to fall into. Wires and nets placed on the paper and :FLASH: it seems as if we’re looking at the grey empty morning sky from a very low angle at an abandoned dockyard. A fucking hedgehog and :FLASH: it’s still a hedgehog!
The boldness and demarcation of the black and white, the flash burned soul of the objects seared onto the surface of the paper like a sunburn, and the strange shapes which cannot be pinned down by words or descriptions all throw a one-two-three punch right into the solar plexus, knocking the eyes back into a spinning whirl with its sheer visual :FLASH: Look at them long enough and shapes will begin to coalesce amidst the radiating chaos.
The second friend of frenzy is another French chap called Stéphane Couturier. His eye for urban and industrial landscapes captures them in the very moment of proliferation. Exploding out of the nucleus of nothing, these rough polygonal shapes like the leftover pieces from a nursery craft class blowing up into smithereens are being shot out in all directions like cannon balls of debris. Or is it imploding? All the individual pieces having their trajectories marked out by a straight line beaming out of the mare’s nest at the heart of the photograph. It’s simultaneously exploding and imploding. Bouncing out then in then out then in then out again until your eyes get tired contracting like muscles in grips of a violent seizure. The longer the eye ruminates on these shapes with their washed-out hues, the picture becomes clear. Steel beams, concrete walls, factory assembly line belts, all distorted and ripped out of shape, but still holding the essence of the whole in these disembodied parts, falling out of the rift which humanity created with its cataclysmic progression.
Aesthetically Pleasing
These are the photographs which land on the eyes and stir them up into a nice cream batter like a leaf blissfully falling to its grassy bed. They strike that perfect note, and the sound hangs in the air for a good few moments until it fades happily out of existence, only all of that happens visually.
An artist from Germany named Adrian Sauer is conning the eyes with technical sleight of hand. Fairly large black and white photos of windows – looking out to a tree, looking into an empty room – and objects like a book laying on a table, all of them with a fine layer of grainy noise over them. Just when the mind begins to slip into a state of VHS nostalgia from this clean grainy noise, what’s that? They’re not black and white photos… Framed in full colour, down to their most fundamental pigments. All 16,777,216 of them. What? How? Feeding the image through a program of his own design, all 16,777,216 colours that a computer can produce in a digital image are contained exactly once. Each miniscule pixel carrying one colour each. The abilities of digital reproduction are being handed right back them. Here, have it! As he twists the arms of his digital machine ever further in the opposite direction, more abstract and basic images are spit out in a bloody cough of noisy image grain.
*cough* *sniff* *cough*
A blue pentagon standing on a red foreground, against a green gradient background, all bathed in that fantastic digital noise. The three components of digital colour, RGB, blasted into their fundamental particles and captured like a soup in this tall frame. Look over here, a great big, tilted triangle – all grained out of its shape – against an undulating background of sharp noise, waves upon waves of infinitesimal dots which amount to an ocean with a volume of, yes, 16,777,216! While Adrian beats his computer into bruised submission, high time to move onto the next eye candy.
More people are shoving their camera aside, rolling their sleeves up, and going straight to the source. Pure luminous light. Coax the thing into passing through whatever they like and pickpocket the image while it’s passing through. British born, Garry Fabian Miller’s corner of the festival was like a music box for light. Those rectangular frames house the moment when vivacious rays of light passed through coloured glass surfaces and landed nuzzling onto the actinic skin of photographic paper. Wooooooooooow!
Strands of the rainbow have been sliced off their arc and beamed into these photographs. Somewhere in-between corporeality and ethereality, these light-beams have movement in their stasis, as if they’re about to zoom off out of the photograph vyyyyyyyooooooom towards where they were originally headed before their paths diverted. As a sort of modernisation of the photogram, much like its progenitor, this resplendent expansion of the technique has endless possibilities for image making. It'll go as far as a ray of light will travel before some stray piece of photographic paper catches it clean out of the vacuum.
Arcane symbols of alchemy, housed in a shiny golden frame. Three of these occult-like images side by side of objects on a table, looks like oak, against a dark background. A flower withering away in a small pot of water. A skull sitting on a book with a pocket watch on the side facing us. Three giant mushrooms growing out of a silver tin. Wait a minute… are these paintings? Surely not. It’s a photo festival, no paintings allowed! Take that stuff across the street. No, it’s definitely a photograph. Remarkable. Everything from the objects, to how they’re composed, and the texture of the photograph looks incredibly painterly. Dramatic outlines and subtle shadows, and even how a leaf is laying limp on the table in the photograph with the flower, look like they were meticulously orchestrated by the hands of a painter. The photographer, Gilles Lorin, achieved this effect after sweating over his prints in the darkroom. There’s a timeless elegance to his depictions of these magical symbols, immortalising them during the peak of their grace by picking them out of the ::::::::::::::::::::::stream::::::::::::::::of:::::::::::::time::::::::::::::::.
Every moment they spend exempt from the way time affects the rest of us, they turn more picturesque. The outlines bolder, the shadows softer, the pigment more flamboyant. Or is that our eyes deteriorating?
Straight out of South Africa and contained within a framed self-contained universe are Johno Mellish’s fastidiously staged shots which look like they’ve been flickerflickerflcikerflickerSLICED straight out of Yorgos Lanthimos film. Each photograph is an independent narrative where the subtleties of the mise-en-scene comment on the political realities of his home country. Two skaters tending to their fallen ally who seems to have taken a nasty tumble in front of a pastel-coloured playground which would make any small sized human feel like they’ve walked into a fortress. A child and a mother, with their backs towards us, watching the father fix up a broken-down car – looks like a Nissan. Two people hugging in a courtyard with a white grid building behind them. A towel-wrapped girl in a swimming bath with two helium balloons lifting a bunch of her bleach blond hair with the intense glare of a boy’s reflection in the mirror on the wall meeting with the camera. A living room after what looks like a toilet paper typhoon swirled through there. What’s really striking about all these images and the rest of Johno’s work is the highly cinematic lighting and staging. Colours shout out and harmonise with other hues in the image, there’s a perfect balance between order and chaos, the composition of the shots dwarf the human subjects and even the cramped and tight photographs leave the viewer with a feeling of standing out in the middle of an
open field
There’s also something incredibly documentary about these images. They seem like the lives of ordinary people in some extremely weird seaside town where newcomers don’t last long. Except that the shots are crafted.
Speaking of the craft of staging a photograph, none come close to what Sandy Skoglund achieves in her surreal, dreamlike scenes of visual excess. Every little detail is lovingly crafted by hand and the entire scene falls together like a nice little pile of dominoes on their edges, standing upright with a slight threatening quiver that they’ll fall over and knock over this surprising perfection. Like a nursery arts and crafts class taken to extremely professional lengths, there’s virgin creativity flashing out of all the consummately paired colours in her photographs. A party of people, every inch of them and the background and the floor the furniture covered in radioactive orange cheese puffs. What seems like a family of three standing in the corner of a large light blue coloured room, the walls of which looks like crumpled wrapping paper are adorned with these large complex paper snowflakes. In the foreground of the shot are blue owls and a melancholy looking statue of a woman. A room made entirely of grass (like the cheese puffs), with blue cats and dogs spread all around the room like the dwelling of a total misanthrope who takes pleasure in the company of such a large collection of domesticated animals. All of these are the snapshots of some preternatural dream that stick with the sleeper long after they’ve awoken, and they use that anchoring image to rebuild the rest of the dream around it.
On the simpler side of her photography, and really, calling it simpler would be a disservice were it not to effectively pleasant, are the pairings and dissolving of patterns.
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With the compulsion to mess around with filigree out of the way, these are the photographs that you’d expect to see hung in your great aunt’s kitchens. Three or four of them in some irregular pairing and layout on the wall next to the fridge. In some the patterns of the background and the object are so perfectly matched that the eye loses its place in the interlocking wave of polka dots and flowers. An effect that’s achieved with such microscopic mastery of framing and levelling the camera up with the seemingly flat fusion of the background and foreground. Cezanne would’ve been proud had someone bought the stiff back to life and dragged him to the Grand Palais Éphémere to see these humble images. Among the unseeable lines of back/foreground are photographs which do the exact opposite and clash patterns together like subatomic particles inside the Large Hadron Collider. A yellow marbled tabletop with an unnaturally square shaped piece of pink marbled ham with round edges sitting defiantly atop it. A dense gathering of white dots on a blue tablecloth with two plates of sunbeam yellow sweet corn on plates with a matching pattern but different colours – orange and white. Another tablecloth, this time with a pattern which can be best described as a collection of empty small Connect4 grids, some in yellow, some in red, some in black, all forming a lined pattern. On top of that is a red polka dot paper plate which looks like a lot of Ladybugs have died to make it, with wet green peas placed side by side in a perfect square. Blue swirling paisley as the background on this one with pieces of cake that have chocolate swirling through them, placed in a circle right in the middle.
A playful sort of experimentation with patterns in these tabletop photographs and the more elaborately staged ones reflect a deep understanding of not just colour theory and composition, but an adroit sense of which strings to pulls in the mind of the audience to create the effect she’s going for. They’re hypnotic, suggestive, all the while being utterly beautiful to look at.
Someone else who’s playing the pattern game. The simple pairing of black and white stripes is so balance that anything thrown in the mix will stand out like an F-16 taking off the M4. Understanding this completely, Yoshinori Mitzutani takes to the streets to shake up this equilibrium, specifically at the zebra crossing. High angled shot of these crossings stretches from one end of the frame to the other, anything caught in the net in the middle becomes the unwitting subject. This includes people walking across with their umbrellas, some red, some blue, others white and black to blend in. BEEP BEEP Here comes a white bus pulling into junction and onto the striped path.
TAXI! Hey what is that jackass doing parking right in the middle of that crossing?
HEY, GET OUT OF THE WAY!
Sure as hell makes a pretty picture when a bright yellow taxi cab is parked all confused and unaware on this stark white and black crossing.
Now here are images so lurid and bright with colour that they’ll briefly mess up the mind of any person who looks at them for long enough with a head full of psychedelic chemicals. Colours SO GODDAMN LOUD that they rupture the eardrums before they even reach the retina. Dutch-Croatian rainbow lady, Sanja Marušić’s photographs lay somewhere in a serene field beyond the image. And it is only via photography that she can achieve such a distortion of reality because pigments this bright don’t exist in the real world and no art supply shop on the planet will sell them. A person dressed in sharp three tone red/blue/yellow has their lowered face obscured by the rim of their same-pattern hat as they walk through a pink and yellow wheat field with fluffy polka dot snakes in a tangle at their feet. Dancing between a row of hot pink and ultramarine plants against a painted blue sky is a bearded man with yellow skin and bright red hair whose choice of outfits did not let the general collection of colours in the image down one bit. In front of dangerously unstable jenga tower of brilliantly coloured wooden planks is a man with red skin, blue hair, and yellow ears, clad in striped jumpsuit which makes a rainbow look pathetically drab. All these images, housed in equally jolly and gayly colourful frames, evoke a profound sense of disconnect from the boredoms and utilitarianisms of society, splattering them with otherworldly colours and subjects engaged in a carefree groove. Because if reality doesn’t really cut it for you, then you make your own and never look back.
Classical
Casting the mind back into the infancy of the photographic medium, these are images in the purest definition of the word. Short-lived, uncertain, and experimental in nature, with every press of the shutter release, the medium evolved, changed and its course altered.
Ponder this little exercise, remove the name of the artist from their artwork, and what are you left with? When the context of their life and oeuvre is removed and no one claims ownership of it - because that’s what art is, it’s power and ownership over a piece of work and of that works over the audience and their attention/emotion/psychology - what is left behind? Unadulterated visual perception, free from the tints of interpretation. The image lays before the eyes, already unfolded and explained, because goddamnit there’s no explanation required. Such is the case with all these orphan photographs with no parent. Parenthood is a sham anyway, because these images all under the name “Photographe Anonyme” seem to be doing just fine by themselves.
A formation of bombers flying towards a solar eclipse against the black sky. A bubble within a bubble within a bubble within a bubble within a bubble on a table in near-perfect symmetry. A huntress aiming a pistol at the camera. A model with a bee-hive hairdo in close-up inspecting a microphone with interest. Children dancing in a line outside a church. Two teenage boys outside the Luxembourg Garden holding a lever-action rifle. A fish skeleton held up to a light source with its equally proportionate shadow falling on the wall behind it in a sort of morbid yin-yang.
Dating back to the early 1900’s these images are the product of people who picked up a camera out of sheer curiosity and began playing around with it. With a complex sense of composition, lightning/shadow, and framing, it begs the question whether these anonymous photographers went on to start pioneering careers in photography under names we’re more familiar with today? Maybe so, or maybe not, but therein rests the question that doesn’t need pondering because when the image is before the eyes, speaking for itself, why bother yourself with all these notions of where and how? Never intended to be pieces of art, they were probably condemned to decades of dust-covered existence in some lockbox in an abandoned attic or in the photo album of some aged collector, to see them adorned upon these walls now is funny, because they’re here as artefacts of history more than pieces of art.
Collage
Like a stick of dynamite shoved into a wall of photographs, what you get after the ensuing explosion and the settling of the dust is a collage. An insane mixture of images and concepts from all over the place. Go wild Jack! You want to make an ocean entirely out of lips cut out from a make-up magazine and then stick the fuselage of an airplane, cut out of an aviation manual, floating with tranquillity on this ebb tide of lipstick? Be my fucking guest. Dipping the paintbrush into the pigment of chaos and letting free all the crazy strokes of genius and stupidity that come into the head of the artist while on the road to making an image. Some collages are pure pandemonium and it’s like staring right into landfill the very moment it’s consumed by a nuclear fireball. There’s a perverse beauty in that too, but it pales in comparison to the methodical madness of knowing what seemingly disparate concepts to pair together, drawing invisible connections from one end of history to another and binding them in one incandescent picture.
Image poetry encased in plastic. No words necessary. Verses short and snappy, uttered by the eyes. Anamaria Briede Westermeyer’s Plastik Poetry is something which bridges the gap between word and image by blending the two together in a way that the stronger one (according to the circumstance), devours the other. In this case, a long line eleven small collages make up each of the five stanzas of this image poem.
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By themselves, these cryptic symbols make very little sense, but at the eyes hop from one collage to the other, this rapid-fire sort of impression begins to weave into a building picture, a narrative. These small images which probably did not take too long to create, just goes to show how a simple idea if executed with the precision and coherence of a good concept, can really come together, and hold a captive audience.
This is good, but Lucia Tallova takes the ‘small collage’ to a whole new level with an entire wall full of framed collages, each one of them a complete image in their own right. 40 of these tiny picture storms takes the art of collage beyond simply combining a couple of images together, by altering the image physically, using its distorted form itself and the residue it leaves on the background as a part of the creation.
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Ribbons twirling out of an image of the Eiffel Tower, a piece of paper shoved right through the Arc De Triomphe, photographs burnt to a crisp peeling off the paper, a crumpled ink-stained picture of a flooded Paris Street, cigarette and smoke stains from a photo of a corpulent man smoking up outside a café, pieces of paper folded together to make a skirt for a pair of legs sticking in from the top of the frame, ink flowing out of from underneath a bridge and into the white background of the image, some images falling straight out of their frames, a Paris street snipped apart so that it disintegrates into a floating mass of windows the further the perspective goes down the road, a pair of legs drowning in the clouds, a park fountain shooting out black tears all over the background. These and many more make up this punchy display of images which have all the speed and effect of a .45 bullet.
Some real playful stuff is happening with collages here by the hands of Romanian artist Iosif Kiraly in this project aptly titled ‘Synapses’. Though there’s very little cutting/pasting going on in the main bulk of the image, there’s definitely a whole lot of stringing up and forming happening. Orbiting around a vast image of a scene are these smaller moons, photographs which are somehow related to the celestial image around which they’re revolving, connected, and held together via the gravity of strings and wires. Any motif in the images that can carry a straight line, telephone wires, lines of perspective, railroad tracks, roads, the distance between the pointed peaks of mountains, they’re all wired up and concatenated like neurons in the brain. Metallic wires run from one image to another, laid right on top of the lines which exist in the photography, and they bring the whole thing together like a web of memories. And as the light is sliced on the edge of these wires, the whole thing is deepened under the shadows and shimmering of the tensile hair. They almost look like the clue board of some hyper-obsessed detective on the verge of breaking a case which has driven him to the darkest depths of manic insanity, metal wires/red string running from one point to another as one thread in a matrix of dense matter.
The world map, as a stage for grotesque play that humanity has been starring in, is proliferated with cross-cultural symbols and multifarious heritages under the eyes of Malala Andrailavidarazana. Post-colonial artists have a sort of psychic predilection for working on the world maps, and though all of them are produced on the same foundations, they all manage to look and say completely different and unique things. Two panoramic maps of the globe are flattened and transformed into a heterogenous kaleidoscope of cultures, giving off the same sort of vibrations as the entire interstellar artwork which surrounds Their Satanic Majesties Last Request. De-colonised and freed from the flattening influence of the invading countries, bright tropical colours, aged paper motifs, where the art styles and symbols of the colonised are mingling freely within the frame through one another. A compressed history of globalisation is presented in a manner bordering on the mystical. It cuts together the impossible utopian picture of a world where megalomaniac didn’t go around and ravage other cultures to a ruin, where those cultures were allowed to thrive and exist in harmony with the others. It would sound like complete bullshit in our world because there’s no room for peace and understanding today, but within the colourful confines of this frame, it’s allowed and encouraged.
The interconnectedness of all matter is embodied in works such as this where useless scraps of paper are repurposed and turned into a living work of textured art. Bank notes, printed and blank paper, road maps, tracing paper and pages out of novels are all cut up into tiny strips by Nathalie Boutté and individually layered together as a portrait. The contours and shades of the face and features are all accounted for with the differing shades of the paper he uses, and the more distance is put between the eyes and the surface of this feathery paper portrait, the clearer it becomes. As the matter which came screaming out of dying stars many billions of years ago in some other part of space makes up little bits of everything around us, much like that visual life is created out of the disused dust of something long dead.
Documentary
Is an explanation really required? Come on. Where the lives and lifestyles of the subjects/objects are portrayed in one, or a series of, succinct and all-encompassing photographs, those are documentary photographs. The blessed, oppressed, depressed, possessed, and unconfessed, they’re all addressed and expressed within this type of photography. Documentary photographers are the fastidious journalists among the image practitioners, embedding themselves into the lives of their subjects to depict them. Of course, much like journalists, they’re in a position of power over their subjects because they can either portray them truthfully or distort their realities for the sake of sensationalism. Either way, it’s a forked path which is completely devoid of objectivity. What with multiple ambiguous truths floating around, this type of photography can go in any way…
Like unmasking some of the current trends in image culture by breaking right through the glass wall and ridding us of the polished reflections of our world we’re forced to surround ourselves with on a daily basis. Asger Carlsen’s ‘Wrong’ as a series of haunting depictions of the daily happenings in a nigh-dystopian world, completely ripped off the moorings of normalcy, does just the thing. These subtly hallucinatory black-and-white/classical-documentary-aesthetic images of people with prosthetic limbs made from crude, almost cartoonish wooden stilts, going about their day like jumping on a trampoline, gathering up a nest of wires for his leaf-blower, a naked girl stretching across the floor, a man riding a motorcycle in full protective gear apart from of course, the wooden fucking stilts. These blatant screech-like photographs force the audience to call into questions ideas like the gaze, repugnance, sloth, gluttony, and mutation. Not in any philosophical or pontifical manner, but in the ambivalence of comic shock. They confront the audience with a world totally weird, blanketed by the radioactive fallout of modern society and the human condition.
In a photo culture saturated with nudes, gratuitous or otherwise, one thing is for sure that we’ve seen enough of them that we as a self-respecting audience don’t wish to see anymore. Some photographers make the excuse of using the female nude as a gesture of reclaiming or reposing the nude, and as clear as their motives may seem in some cases, it’s balefully clear that the art audience has reached something of a nude-fatigue. So, to find Milja Laurila’s unabashed subversion of the nude here was such a stark and much needed relief that a voice of protest is finally being broadcasted through the art space. These photographs are simple in nature, black and white images of nude women but obscured by a translucent sheet of paper with a rectangle cut out around the eyes. Where the shapes and features of their bodies remain hazy, we’re allowed a sustained glare into their eyes. Their powerful stare inverting the roles of spectator/artwork and stripping us down.
When the domestic suddenly turns into a threatening place, unsafe and invasive, people must form additional shelters within their homes. Gimme, gimme some shelter, or else I’m gonna fade away. People turning against you, troubles catching up with you, things going horribly wrong. Build a fort. Hide there until it all blows over. Joanna Pitrowska’s unveiling photographs of pillow and blanket forts with people taking sanctuary inside these shaky and temporary shelters depict this act of seeking safety. Chairs and sofas used to prop up the walls of these havens, the people sitting inside them look pensive and patient, safe inside their own bubbles of comfort and safety.
Salvoes of bright, intense yellows wave past the eyes. Where do they come from? Ah, the walls. In a summery little section of the festival which looks like a beach and a breeze captured within an open plan space, are the photographs of Olivier Culmann which make up his most recent project called “The Conviviality Conversion”. Travelling through the French countryside and seaside towns, his camera picked up those staples of French conviviality, the cafes, and documented how these places managed to stay standing after the sudden lung wrenching financial blow of the COVID pandemic. But you’ll see none of the standard bred, worn out documentation of dreary empty streets, shuttered fronts, and ransacked shelves. Culmann’s eye see differently. His project is celebration of community resilience, the people who flow in and out of the places and keep them alive with their joy and support.
With the installation organised in a particular way so that the scene builds from one wall to the other, Culmann’s creative process and inspiration as well as the journey of the customer is broken down step by step in each section. First there’s the facades. In vintage wooden frames, the sort you’d find in a countryside café, are photographs of cafes and their storefronts. It almost seems wrong to call them a mere photograph, as the way these facades are portrayed like expectant faces, these images act more as portraits.
Once you’re through the door, there’s the staff. The people who stuck with it through thick and thin and kept the place open for you. With a photograph for each café, the staff are dresses alike in their plain, bold coloured shirts, striking the same pose, looking like the synchronised parts of one efficient whole, they’re framed in wonderfully ecstatic scenarios. Not in their workplace, because it isn’t about that. Out in the wild. Each photograph looks like the first scene of a highly choreographed dance sequence, that moment of dormant flow just before it bursts out and everyone breaks into sudden dance. On the wall facing this one are more photographs of the staff, same clothing, but this time huddled together like a poster of some football team. Name of the town or city plastered across or down on the side of the “poster” with an emblem of sorts, the staff are in the middle, the ones in the front taking the knee, the ones in the back standing upright, all in tight formation like they’re about to go out onto the field and stomp their opponents silly.
Shooting diagonally from there is a gigantic collage of overhead shots of many drinks served in the cafes he’s made his object. In that multi-coloured hive of repeating composition are many drinks that escape the count of the mind, many colours, flavours, and types, each on with their diverse table background. Juices, coffees, teas, water, soda, you name it, they’re all there. It almost looks like a stripped-down montage sequence of these drinks, jump cutting at regular intervals to the next.
Finally, adjacent to that wall are postcards depicting summery scenes which look like they’ve been pulled straight out of travelling commercial. With closing glimpses of the country and seaside towns he’s passed through, these postcards encapsulate the entire experience in the form of a memory, stamped and posted.
Unusual Techniques of Exhibition
Exhibition makes up half the artwork. Without it, there’s no spine to hold the artwork up, it’s limp. An artform which has been in constant change since its birth, the modes of exhibition should match the pace and intensity of its evolution. The artistes among the photographers realise that the art isn’t simply in developing/printing, framing it and then hanging up their photographs. That sort of tradition has been running along consistently since the birth of photography. Which was in 1839 Jack. The DNA is changing, and tradition is being shaken off as a weak trait. Natural selection will soon begin doing its thing.
To illustrate the importance of how the manner of departure from the safeties of tradition need to match the concept of the artwork, here’s one where the concept and exhibition are so out of synch that they crash into a wall. Agnés Geoffray’s offerings at the festival, though pictorially quite noteworthy, are total obfuscated by the way they’re presented, house in round-edged glass boxes, some red, some black, all of them see through, sat upon a shelf. Nothing in the contextual statement explains the presence of these boxes. Why? Are there here merely to tick an aesthetic box? Yes, they look kind of cool, but was that worth ruining the effect of the photography, which itself does a lot better without being trapped in glass cages.
Here's some of the good stuff. I swear it’s not cut with rat poison.
In a darkened little room, there’s an image of a typewriter on the wall with a blank white space where the sheet of paper should be. From the part of the typewriter where the paper is fed in, comes an intense red neon glow which invades the whole dark space like an open trapdoor to hell. There’s something unsettlingly portentous about this red light which is spreading everywhere. Suddenly a projector starts whirring and one after another, images are projected onto the white space where the sheet of paper should be, looking like these images are coming straight out of the typewriter. Men, women and children, all looking distressed as if they’ve watched their entire town reduced to a pile of ashes, completely ridden and in precarious circumstances. Sliding from one image to the next, a scene is created. They look like war images ripe for a newspaper. Readers will go nuts for this. What’s the headline? And that’s where the trouble begins… Alfredo Jaar’s “The Power of Words” confronts the diametrically opposed relationship between text and image. Rarely do they every truly complement each other, and often one is trying to overcome the other. A simple sentence can sabotage the entire impression of an image and vice versa. Hence the fiendish red-hot glow emanating from the mouth of the typewriter, signifying the danger words can have in altering/diluting/exaggerating the true scenes of these horrific photographs, almost as if a single word typed on the machine would smoulder the images.
Hey, how about we mess around with the frame itself? What could go wrong? Nothing as it turns out with Hassan Hajjaj’s resplendent portraits. The photographs he takes of his idols and other celebrities are the bees knees themselves, with explosive uses of textile, eye-ripping colours, and interlocking patterns, all of these dancing and swivelling in all aspects of the scene and the clothing of his subjects. And he ensures that the frame in which the photo is held doesn’t fall short of the rainbow song he’s arranging. Bordering the frame are things like boxes of tea, round tins of butter or oil, usual household/pantry items which reflect or complement the brilliant colour schemes he’s cooking up in the photos. Beyond being mere aesthetic accompaniments, these framed items relate to the culture of their subjects. Stark white Arabic lettering embossed on the neon surfaces of these items, there’s a sort of friendly homeliness to these celebrities once they’re literally surrounded by kitchen items. Almost as if they’re about to brew you a cup of tea. Two sugars please.
Those artworks which play on the human perception and perspective from which the work is being viewed come with incalculable ways of seeing the thing. Move an inch to the left or right and the artwork will transform into something completely different. Move about as much as you want all the way till the power of some really large number or until you get tired and move onto the next one, and every time you’ll see something different. These fractal pieces of art, scalpel in hand, dissect human perception by condensing limitless perspectives into a space of a few squared inches. The mind turns limp like a handful of seaweed when thrown on a spectrum so large.
Two such art pieces were present at Paris Photo, with very different vibrations but equally matched in their boundlessness. In the red corner is Jošt Dolinšek’s mirrored prison bars, part of his To Move the Sun and Earth Away project. Thin sheets of mirrored glass slot into the frame vertically every few inches apart over black and white scenes of desolate bleakness; frozen wastes, jagged cliff edges, cobwebbed branches in empty fields, lonely rocks floating on open rivers. The images can only be properly seen in their entirety if seen straight on, any deviation from the dead centre and parts of the image begin reflecting|gnitcelfer in on themselves. In the blue corner is an unfolding of light, a stretching of shades like soft candy in robot hands on a factory floor, the microscopic levels of the visible spectrum enveloping around the eyes in the shape of Mustapha Azeroual’s Radiance photographs. They’re simply four colours blending with a gradient into one another, like scattered sun rays during dusk turning pinker the further away it travels through the cloud walls, printed underneath a layer of lenticular rows. You know exactly what they are, those pictures which change when you move a bit to the side or move the image itself, and they make a high-pitched plastic whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine when you scratch them against the lines. Imagine an image already at melting point, changing states and now on top of that there’s an extra layer of flux to it. Continuous metamorphosis. The colour carnival never ends here folks. If this shade has been laying on your eyes for too long, just taken a step to the right and you’ll like this other shade. Pure vaudeville.
Two completely different visual qualities – on two opposite ends of the show floor – and they attain their near-infinities in differing yet equally creative ways. Both play on opposite ends of the duality of light too, where the light particle ricochets around the confines of the image, creating a complex feedback loop of reflections in Jošt’s pieces, Radiance suspends the light wave in static animation, allowing us to view it from all angles. Radiance especially, is something which will take on new form from place to place, many variables including the lighting of the exhibition space falling on the photograph, will alter the way the colours ////hum\\\\ out of the image. It’s something immune to the act of cheap reproduction, no picture of it on the internet will ever come close to how the thing looks in person, the eyes sliding across the smooth gradients of the tones as it dances its way from one shade to the next through sheer ecstatic perspective motion.
Buzzing around like a swarm of crazed wasps in the glass hive of the mind are the memories of the last ten years. Day to day occurrences which meant a whole lot to you then are now indistinguishable among the frantic blur of sound and colour. Memory flows into our skulls like water into a bowl, pushing out what came in first to make space. This is what Laurence Aëgerter’s Confetti embodies in terms made palatable, the accumulation of memory. In a glass box hooked to a fan underneath it is 58,038 tiny photographs, all of them pictures from Laurence’s phone over the last decade, shrunk down, printed, and cut out to the size of a piece of confetti. All of them, flying around in a path dictated by pure chaos, colliding with one another like rocks in an asteroid field. Every so often the fan will turn off and all of them will find themselves no longer the plaything of pandemonium and falling suddenly into a neat pile of blurry memories. There’s something quite inviting and open about laying all her personal memories out for the audience to see, yet she denies us the intimacy by making them all very hard to virtually impossible to see.
Interphotography
The highway system between the many forms of image-making is easily travelled. A lot of traffic goes both ways. When traditional photography is put aside, or other forms of photography are used outside of their purposes, that’s when some truly remarkable imagery is produced.
Stretching across a long frame and flashed over a black background are David Monteleone’s birds eye view of geographical land masses. Like segments of Earth carved out of their surroundings using nothing but straight lines, these bits of land float in nothingness, held in the eye of the photographer, separate from the land in which its details are less noticeable. Multiple separate photographs are colliding together to form this jagged panorama of what the eye in the sky sees when it zooms past far above our heads. As a sort of satellite map, mountain ranges with all their streams and snow-capped patches rooted into the planet like a rough fractal are given the appearance of nerve fibres and muscles, highways and ring-roads spiralling out of the city in concentric circles look like human-made crop circles in the desert. When extracted out of their familiar surroundings, these land masses take on a completely different, almost human, air.
Paintings? What? I thought we had agreed that this would be a photograph only thing… Well, I suppose an exception can be made for this, given that they’re so uncanny. These panel paintings, except that they’re splashed on paper rather than panels, by Paolo Ventura are strange blocks of surrealism. Bits of square paper, like large pixels, are painted on and combined to depict weird scenes of loneliness and desolation. The French Way. Rusted and damp block houses and a dead tree, the only thing standing on a grey waste under a sullen sky. A man in a black coat and hat, who looks like the spitting image of Ralph Fiennes, leaving behind a trailing wisp of smoke from his cigarette which flows parallel to a wire on which a tight-rope walker creeps along against a starry black sky. Two wrestlers brawling in a deserted courtyard in front of what seems like soviet-era apartment blocks. Ralph Fiennes is back again with his black clothes and cigarette but wandering in the other direction in a green field where a man does a handstand on a donkey behind him. The utter sense of aimlessness in these landscape paintings, which just about pass off as photographs, have distinct lines between the back|foreground, the horizon|sky, the interior|exterior, treating them as entities which are forever walled off from one another in a world that’s been swept by the hot dusts of an apocalypse. Then in a small corner next to these desolate landscapes are two antithetical works by him which evoke a diametrically opposed emotion.
Delightful peace radiates the lush pink petals of these flowers sitting idly in their vases. Just like their distant landscape cousins, these flowers are also composed of pieces of paper side by side in a grid, each one bearing their respective weight of the image. Their soft shadows fall on the bright blue and red wall behind them, and like a knife swung through the sun, yellow paint splatters both paintings. What happened here? Did he slip? Was this on purpose? Probably. Because why not.
Nocturnal photographs which emerge once the sun swings under the Earth, their blue tints are a vision of the moon itself. A blue which is darker and deeper than black, these infra-blue images look like they’re filtered through the eyes of some night animal. Their lineage comes from blueprints and floorplans. What, you ask? The same act of light and image copulation which brings forth the blueprints, also brought these images to the land. Cyanotypes are what they’re known as, and everything printed through these cyan screens come out with a deep blue tint of melancholic darkness. Gilles Lorin, hey you again, is back with something different. Image of the night. Crops with lining up to tree which stands lost against the blue void. A dense thicket of slender trees with no leaves streaking up to the sky and filling the frame with their branches. The moon. All the objects in these images are a crisp white against their blue counter. And then, as a kind of masterful combination of all the photographs in Gilles’ corner, there’s this dense paisley photograph of leaves, flowers, and other flora, but wait… is that textile? No. Any fingers running against the surface of the photograph, if such a transgression could be gotten away with, would feel the smooth silk of the paper. Not textile. But it sure as hell looks like it. Like some luxurious piece of cyanotype fabric, it makes sense why it’s housed in a frame. No one in their right mind would let such a fabric loose around their house. But enough of this fabric talk! It’s not even textile. The very quality of the print betrays the eyes, the cyan cutting through it with a velvety permeance. Time to leave before more absurd confusions over textile and reality begin to loom together.
Physical Alteration of the Image
When the scene itself doesn’t cut it, the photographer cuts it themselves. Take the knife straight onto the image and have it at your mercy.
What Anne Bean from Zambia has concocted here after her knife was through with the photograph is a failed resistance to metamorphosis. The image of two women has been slashed sideways to tatters and the strands interlocked so that the two women are blending into one. Possession and the opposition to it, this self-contained collage of itself is the fight between the two women from turning into one another. Near the end of the process, no identifiable feature of either woman can be made out among the rough strands of photo-skin which has been weaved together, just barely an outline of a face in the throes of some pain.
Three haunting images of a woman being possessed and consumed by her own hair. Every bit of her skin covered and strangled by her own thick hair, these sharp lines run across and around the shape of her face in profile. A combination of embroidery and actual human hair is running amok among these insane lines. The grip of the demon hair tightening with every subsequent image, devouring the woman herself and beginning to leave empty blackness behind. Bits of her are disappearing among the strangle, cut straight out of the image. In the final image, most of her is eaten away by the darkness, leaving only a hairy outline which borders the emptiness of her possession. This is the siege laid by the inner demons as seen through the startling eyes of German artist, Annagret Soltau.
Wandering through the forests, head full of strong acid, the trees begin to wave and ripple and all the gaps tiny gaps between the dense depth of branches and twigs which extend as far as the eyes are breach through the trees are beginning to light up with colours. As the light passes through the small gaps in the sprawling expanse of all the trees reach, it trickles through shards of stained glass and gemstones which now fill those gaps. Many different colours and any which you like paint the gaps in the branches and tints the light that passes through them. These are Sarah Ann Johnson’s kaleidoscopic forests, her vision of the many trees which shoot out of the ground near her hometown of Manitoba and the many walks taken among them. The first rising acceleration of the acid as it takes over the mind and throws the vision into the order pure colour, these large photographs look into the forest and share a glance with the tinted light as it soars from the sun and through the many pieces of stained glass and gems which have been cut and glued to the surface of the images. Psychedelic drug fuelled vision aside, there’s a serene flow of peaceful connection and identification with nature in these photographs, when the perception begins to shift and flutter from spending time away from the bad noise and craziness of the city, among the purity of the nature.
Powerful Imagery
When the visual quality of the image or the message is sending is so powerful that it gets physical, those are the ones that deserve to be in this category. You feel the impact of these images down at the pit of your stomach and must sit down a moment to catch your breath. They can be beautiful, ugly, harmful, vengeful, cosmic, and small.
Heads on fire in black and white. The flame dancing off the skin of a man and woman in distressing pain. Where did this come from, they look like they ask themselves, and how long until I’m cooked to a crisp? Their screams are muffled by the flames, and no one comes to their aid. Self-immolation as seen by Anne Bean, hello again. The elements are switched with a woman submerged in water as she screams out the word “MORTALITY”. Five black and white photographs of her gurgling out the syllables underwater, with a volcanic rage evaporating the water into silly bubbles around her face. On each photograph is scrawled in black marker the very syllable being uttered. Two mediums of art come together here as photography chronicles performance art. In both cases the subjects give out a death shriek bought about by complete engulfment from two equally deadly elements. The fragility of life and mortality itself is burned and drowned in these images and they’re done so with unabashed flagrance. It’s a reality check that’s needed from time to time.
Who knew that a frying pan held in its material, surface, and shape, representations of the cosmic and the microscopic, geometric, and molecular? Seen from arm’s length, or even quite close up, it looks like a usual frying pan, ready to receive some butter and a few eggs. But diving closer and closer to its surface, getting right up against the microscopic edge of sight, does the identity of the frying pan fly away. In Hitoshi Fugo’s Flying Frying Pan, that is exactly what happens. Black and white photographs of a frying pan from extremely close and invasive angles depict scenes that are abstract, geometric, and otherworldly. Abyssal blacks and starry whites show interstellar fields spreading across the inside wall of the pan. Comets shoot with their smoky trails etched across the black sky as they burn up in the atmosphere with a twinkling luminance. The worn-down underside of the frying pan turns into the empty white beach on some lost planet. Scuff marks hold in them the chaos of molecules and geometric bridges between stains. A frantic blur of stars and lights oscillating back and forth turn so abstract that god knows what part of the frying pan was photographed here. Only a thing so innocuous being held as the subject of Fugo’s scrutiny could produce images so profound. They have existential dread and a dwarfing feeling of insignificance orbiting them and they make reality recede away from view as the inky blackness of firmament begins to leak out and stain everything around them.
Shadow Play
As light governs all of photography, it often overshadows a whole other part of itself. Shadows. The shapes casted when the darts of light are blocked by some impassable objects aren’t merely the absence of light, but a projection of it. Those who are acutely aware of the capabilities of light, wield not just the white but the black side of this luminosity and see images all around them, even when it isn’t so bright.
An entire maze-like corner of the show-floor was dedicated to Herbert Litz and a project of his called Mediterrenea. Photographs of his trip to the Mediterranean came back with many which played with the shadows falling through the scenes. A world hidden beneath the light which flows through the one we see. In black and white too, these shadows remain their true, untinged selves. Sunlight falling against a column of pillars casts their long shadows at regular intervals across the steps of a ruin. A man standing underneath a straw roof turned into a tightly stripped zebra. Statues standing in a square casting their sharp shadows off to the side as if engaged in dialogue on a stage. More statues on the roof of some great building cast their shadows down below on the flat courtyard, watching the people down below as guardians with their protection extending as far as their shadows fall. Playful and innovative, these felicitous happenings of Litz being at the right place at the right time to witness the shadows dancing in weird and sultry ways would almost suggest that the light curves in a funny manner around the man himself if he can capture so many perfect images of something that exists in a very short windows and under very specific circumstances.
Textile
This seems to be the emerging trend in photography this year. Everyone from professionals to students are doing it. That, and gold leaf. A form of physically altering the image, artists are taking a needle and thread to their photographs rather than a knife, stitching either over existing lines of form or creating new images within the existing one itself. Or they just print and stitch their photographs straight onto and out of fabric. Who needs paper anyway when you have a wardrobe full of clothes you don’t even wear?
As the sun wakes up and begins its ascent of the sky, the very first steps it ritualistically takes are charged with an energy and light that won’t be seen until it’s ready to turn in for the day. Its light is scattered and refracted across the sleepy skies of the early morning and shift into all manner of strange and brilliant colours which no person of sound mind would think to paint the sky with. These bright pinks and soft oranges moving into the violets and yellows turn the skies into a garden of light. This is what Joana Choumali sees on her morning walks and the photographs she takes between the hours of 5 and 7am, when the world is waking and little by little, parts of it emerge out of their slumber and into the dawning wakefulness. Photographs of the town being thrown into a pale indigo tint from the pink fabric sky which she embroiders with shiny golden string. Certain motifs like flowers, plants, people’s clothes, birds, and bodies of water will be completely embroidered as they stand out against the melange of textures in the photograph. Lines of vision and rays of light shooting out from lamps or other light sources are stitched with colourful string, in straight lines. Some outlines like buildings and pathways are emphasised with the stitching. All this careful and loving embroidery and stitching, combining photography of a truly beautiful moment of the day with fabric produces dreamy sceneries and images sparkling with the enthusiastic excitement of the day to follow as people get moving with the sun.
In the junkie’s hell, there’s nothing but trash. These photographs are scenes of the wealth amassed by abandonment and degradation. Pollution and debris everywhere. The tell-tale signs that humans roamed these parts a while ago. Part photograph, part trash, Naomi Safran-Hon’s tableaus of wreckage and destruction are so dense with filth that the surface of the photograph is bristling with the dirt it depicts. Where there’s a mound of debris and junk littered all over the place inside a large room with wrecked walls and missing doors, one side of the photograph shows the scene as it is, while on the other side of the photograph which lives past the tiny gap between each half is texture. Two different eyes looking at the same scene from the same angle and perspective. Sequins and embroidery serve as a texture and colour continuity from one half of the photograph to the other as if the trash is leaping out from their image immortality. Reeds and tall grass in a murky swamp are given more presence with black strings and embroidery. They not only rise up, but out of the photograph like swamp gas. Demonstrating a shrewd sense of creativity, these images are pretty damn ugly, however. But since when was all art meant to be pretty.
Long forgotten photographs, corners and edges wearing down, hold in them history and emotions. What Julie Cockburn then does is source all these forgotten photographs and touches into their histories and brings them out right to the surface in in the shape of the emotions it brings out in her. Postcards, holiday snaps, portraits and other photographic trinkets which got scattered by time are given the loving treatment of her embroidery. The leaves and blossoming pink flowers of a tree are embroidered onto the photograph. The plumage and feathers of birds stitched with not just string, but beads and sequins as well. A portrait of a man with black and grey circles stitched together to form something akin to the ink blots of a Rorschach test. A woman’s face swathed in the colourful gradients of a rainbow and then the effect of a layer of that colour being peeled right off the photograph. These abstract patterns fervently retouched onto these old photographs gives them a new and prolonged life full of bliss and colour. The embroidery sits on the slick surface of the photograph like a layer of stitched felicity.
Transcending Traditional Photography
Tradition being peer pressure from dead people, it’s wearing thin in a world governed by absolute chaos. Why the hell are you still doing things in this outmoded way when no mode matters? Why limit yourself, do whatever the fuck you want. Photography going in that direction of anarchic evolution, the best kind is that which flies in the face of tradition and breaks right through to the other side. The fundamental conventions of the medium, its exhibition and production should be subverted and twisted into new forms of expression.
One such project which stood out from every single piece of artwork at the festival did this. Using some of the most bizarre yet obvious thing to produce its images. Like plants. The original photosensitive material, once artists got their hands on them, it was the springtime of photography indeed. One such artist, Almudena Romero, her project titled The Pigment Changes takes root in naturally occurring photographic processes in plants and using them to make images. Countless little white frames are hung around the walls, except the images aren’t developed on paper, but on leaves. Projected right into leaves of different shapes and sizes are images of hands in various gestures. These hands, in the act of making something glow with the change and flux that exists in nature itself. Each moment is as act of creating the next one. The real showstopper, however, were two giant walls of grass which seemed to have an image growing within it. Except that it wasn’t grass, it was watercress, and the image wasn’t growing, it was dying. Taking negatives of some photos out of her family album, Almudena exposed a giant bed of watercress seeds to a projection of these negatives, and each seed would grow a certain height to produce the image in the grass. This ingenious use of photosynthesis and photoperiodicity – how plants react to the amount of light they’re given – produces an image which is ephemeral, unstable, and disappearing. The image was crisp and clear on the first day, by the second it had faded slightly, and on the third the plants began to wither taking the image of her family along with them.
Up until this point, art was something which was dead, devoid of any of its own emotions and being merely a carrier for the artists emotions and messages. But now this leaves us with a work of art which is alive, changing by the moment and destined for death like the rest of us.
On the Way Out
That’s it. Leave, flee, scram, get out of here. And on your way out, nod at the noble metallic Frenchman and his bronze horse Binky on the way out. This was the place to be to see what the new movements in photography are at the moment. Like Darwin checking in on a species every few million years to track their evolution, artists, students, historians, academics, all gathered here to check up on what mutations have occurred in the photographic DNA. A fair few it seems. The image of the entire medium of photography is one which is still taking in light, still forming and will continue to do so evermore because it’s an image with an exposure time of eternity.
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