Italia

Don't know how it's taken me this long but I've only recently discovered the work of Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri. This month's Art Forum has an amazing portfolio of images (the last two images are snaps from these) and an essay that is well worth a read if you would like to know more.

Deptford

My Favourite Photograph

Wolfgang Tillmans - Young Man, Jeddah, a, 2012

Tomorrow I will be talking about this image at The Photographers' Gallery as part of their series of My Favourite Photograph Talks. The talk will begin in the gallery cafe at 1pm.

Amsterdam

In the kitchen

When I'm not out at college in the studio one of my favourite places to spend time is in the kitchen of our house in Ealing. Over the summer we managed to grow a little of our own produce despite being away much of it, the cabbages in particular were delicious fried in olive oil and garlic. I've also been able to try my hand at pasta thanks to Dulcie buying me my own Imperia Pasta Maker for my birthday back in September, using Tipo 00 flour from the amazing Lina Stores on Brewer Street in Soho. Of course, Fred the cat is never far away, demanding his dinner or more often a little attention!

Details from Butterworth Station, Penang

Butterworth Station is in the north of Peninsular Malaysia and is situated next to the ferry terminal which provides access to Pilau Penang. We arrived here after an ovenight train from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur and a subsequent six hour train journey up the mainland, taking in much of rural Malaysia along the way.

Tennis

Yesterday, whilst taking a break from manning the stall at the book fair, I came across a book by Giasco Bertoli consisting of a series of photographs of abandoned tennis courts, a set of melancholic images reflecting on these disused, unloved spaces. These spaces of leisure were varied in their location, from inner-city to holiday resorts, all are united in their conspicuous absence of activity. After seeing these images and watching the French Open Final today I have to say I'm quite keen to get out on a court and have a knock around...

Reflection

A little sneak peek at a series of photographs I've been working on, looking at plant life and flora within the urban environment. I've been attempting to create a sense of ambiguity with the framing of the shot, and it is a continuation of this idea of the in-between that I've been interested in for some time now. I've been starting to realise that my work needs a more systematic approach and a sense of a framework that would be given by undertaking a more specific project, and this is something I will be attempting to address over the coming months before my final year...

A return to form

I first saw Walead Beshty's work at the Tate Trienniel a couple of years back, where curator Nicolas Bourriaud had selected a number of his photogram works alongside his glass Fed Ex boxes as part of the exhibition. The show, which attempted (whilst not quite succeding) to propose a new stage in the trajectory of postmodernism - Altermodern - essentially brought together a large number of artists loosely connected by their work's capacity to address the globalised world we inhabit today. Seen in this context it is easy to see why Beshty was chosen, his photograms alluding to the X-Ray machines encountered at Airport security checks - indeed, this is how they are made, with negatives being passed through the machines and then prints being made from the results - and the Fed Ex boxes an obvious symbol of trade and globalised travel, their transit to and from exhibitions leaving visible traces in the gradual cracking of the glass boxes.

Beyond this Beshty's works addresses the wider questions of medium, specifically in his case the medium of photography. His work, particularly the photograms and also his other camera-less work made in the darkroom, forms part of a dialogue with a number of artists whose practice involves photography who are dealing with the question of medium and form, a seemingly outdated concern associated with Clement Greenberg and modernist painting. Yet it would seem that these old arguments are coming to the fore with photography (consider Michael Fried's recent book on photography), a medium that is by nature ambiguous and is perhaps still having to assert itself amongst a portion of the art world - indeed, the title of Fried's book, Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before, almost parodies (unintentionally, of course) photography's contested status as an artistic medium.

It is this ambiguity of the nature of photography - what it actually is - that is perhaps leading to these formal explorations. Beshty states that photography is essentially a type of medium, "constituted by a dialectic of applied use and technological development" that is "in a state of constant revision". With the advent of digital technology posing fresh questions about the indexical nature of the photographic image and assigning analogue photography to a specific moment in history, categorised and reference-able, it would appear that these explorations of medium are only just beginning to be rethought.

A thought

Wolfgang Tillmans' practice has always blurred distinctions between high art, commercial and documentary forms of photography. These photos are from a series of images taken in Haiti which appeared some time ago on the BBC website and are perhaps his closest to straight journalistic work. Although they appear here as part of a concise series there is nothing to stop these photos appearing in one of his installations in dialogue with other images from his archives, in fact it is not improbable that they won't. These photos raise questions that are also examined in the work of Allan Sekula, whose work I blogged about below, questions regarding the relationship between journalistic or documentary photography and fine art photography and the representation of labour in fine art photography. The topic of representation is particularly interesting, the ethical implications of 'straight' photographers like Tillmans and Sekula seemingly questioned by the 'near documentary' or staged realism of a practitioner such as Jeff Wall. Photography has long been a medium questioned by the high/fine art establishment of the West, Greenberg's assessment of it's 'transparency' as a medium still posing the main problem for those looking for the work of the artist's hand in the final output. I feel that it is increasingly methods of display that are redefining the nature of 'straight' photography in the world of art, from Tillmans' heterogeneous wall installations to people such as Sekula and Zoe Leonard employing conceptual traditions such as the series or the grid to frame their documentary influenced practice.

Post Script 26/04: Interesting news this evening: Jim Goldberg's documentary project Open See has won this year's Deutche Borse prize for photography, triumphing over amongst others Thomas Demand.

To the sea

Allan Sekula's Fish Story uses photography and text to document the enormous, globalised industry of trade. Divided into chapters, the work examines through photography and text the place of the sea as an in-between space of advanced capitalism, focusing on subjects such shipyard workers, post-industrial port communities and the ubiquitous shipping containers which are at once a sign of globalised trade, vital to its very being and pushed to the margins of visibility by a society, or system, that tends to attempt to make invisible the origins of its commodities.

As Benjamin H. D. Buchloh astutely observes in an essay written for the book form of the project, Sekula's work and wider practice seeks to engage through direct representation the labour which is removed from view, something he argues runs concurrently with modernist prohibition on representation, and specifically representation of labour - he uses here Bernd and Hilla Bechers' Typologies for an example of a labour that is represented conspicuously in its absence. As Buchcloh examines, Sekula's practice works in the discursive space between art photography and that 'lower' form of documentary photography. By engaging directly a photojournalistic means of photography Sekula is questioning the modernist hierarchy imposed on photography, an art form which has always sat uneasily at the art world table. Through his direct representation and use of photo-narrative he is consciously working in opposition to the modernist 'new objectivity' of the Bechers and of the de-skilled snapshot readymades of Ed Ruscha, as well as questioning the role of photojournalism, which has always been found in the world of high art only though appropriation and fragmentation. The body of work, then, can be seen as at once a critique of the role of photography as institutionalised by Western modernism, as well as, on a more simple level, a critique of the mechanisms of advanced capitalism, the lives of the people who are at once a part of its inner workings and who rely on it for survival, and perhaps more than anything a homage to the immensity of the sea.

On the road

I came across this book the other day by Pablo Leon de la Barra, who writes this really good blog. It's a photographic travel diary of a trip to his native South America, an exploration of the cities he visited and a reflection of place and community. The book's title, 'Useless Landscape', perhaps gives us a clue as to the juxtapositions he is making, focusing often on empty places that have fallen into disrepair or in-between peripheral parts of the cities that have been inhabited by people. There is something quite melancholic but also optimistic about this collection of photographs, one that looks affectionately at an area of the world where extremes of lifestyles sit side by side, a place where the peeling paint of abandoned buildings is shadowed by the presence of towering concrete skyscrapers, where the locals set up their carts for trade along empty highways. More than anything it makes me want to travel...