06: Maps & Routes
Some photographers use maps and routes to inform their work. Eugene Atget documented the streets of old Paris, often recording the location on his photographs. A 1 - The Great North Road is a book of photographs by Paul Graham, which records a journey from London to Edinburgh. For the series Diorama Map, Sohei Nishina takes a multitude of photographs of a particular city, which are then pieced together to create a large-scale map. Mona Hatoum used scanned images of maps to explore the idea of boundaries in her work Routes II. Investigate appropriate sources and produce your own response to Maps and routes.
Initial thoughts:
I was drawn to this starting point because I am already interested in the relationship between photography and walking. I enjoy visiting new places and discovering them on foot and I always take my camera because this helps me slow down, pay attention to my surroundings and notice things. Here are a few ideas about potential experiments to carry out in the coming weeks:
- Throw a dart at a map and visit this location to make pictures
- Take a journey by bus or train to the end of the line and back, making images along the way and at the terminus
- As above but getting off at, for example, every tube station along the line to photograph each location in turn
- Making pictures out of the window of a bus or train in motion
- Visit a train or bus station to make images of the comings and goings
- Journey to the outskirts of the city and photograph a suburban 'edgeland' space
- Make pictures on my way to and from school each day over a period of several weeks
- Experiment with various ways to edit and sequence my pictures e.g. using chance or numbering systems derived from public transport etc.
- Experiment with various ways to present my images e.g. on top of maps, using multimedia and found footage/sounds etc.
- Conduct walks along pre-drawn map routes e.g. tracing letters on roads to create words and walking them (see Paul Auster's City of Glass)
- Conduct a series of dérives (drifts) through the city and document its psychogeography
Some recent images related to this theme:
Here are some recent pictures that seem to be relevant to this theme. I suppose this shows that I am already responding to the idea of Maps & Routes when I am out photographing. My intention is to make this a more focused, thoughtful and deliberate process over the coming weeks.
NAVIGATING the CITY
Research: Eugène Atget
Atget's pictures of Paris indicate different ways of thinking about Maps & Routes. He is best known for his photographs of streetscapes, especially the narrow, winding roads of the old medieval city, partly because they were being demolished at the end of the 19th century to make way for the boulevards. He would have presumably walked across the city looking for suitable views to photograph, carrying his massive view camera and tripod. Making a photograph like this would have been quite a performance. He seems to have been as interested in the suburbs as he was the centre of the city. I particularly like his photographs of the insides of buildings - courtyards and colonnades - and I can imagine sauntering down them on the way to somewhere else. These interstitial, liminal spaces are part of the experience of city life, providing places to stop off, to look, to consume and to rest.
Here is an interactive Google Map identifying the locations of several Atget photographs:
Here is an interactive Google Map identifying the locations of several Atget photographs:
Close AnalysisThis photograph depicts a doorway into a large, imposing building through which we can see another door and a courtyard beyond. Dappled light is playing on the surface of the building. The columns and portico surrounding the door are elaborate and the building itself appears to be made of large blocks of stone. This is clearly a significant place. The title refers to a door of the Cluny, and research reveals this to be a large museum of medieval artifacts. which was originally l'Hôtel des Abbés de Cluny, a small château in the centre of Paris. Atget set himself up as a photographer of old Paris, making documents for artists. These were intended to be studies of buildings and objects that painters could use, rather than works of art in their own right. Later, after Atget's death, other photographers championed the work and they became hugely influential, especially in America.
In this image, Atget shows us a route through the building, moving from light to dark and back to light again. We imagine walking from outside to inside and back to outside. The open door is an invitation to step inside and explore the space. On the other hand, Atget has created a composition of relatively abstract, geometric repetitions. We are shown mostly straight parallel and perpendicular lines, a sequence of nested rectangles, the one exception being the arch above the first doorway which itself is decorated with various curvilinear, organic forms. We can just about make out real plants at the foot of the doorway and the patterns of light on the outside wall also relieve the relentless geometry of the rest of the image. Of course, a photograph is a two dimensional image so there is an inherent tension here between the deep space of the real building (captured by the diminishing scale of the building in the photograph) and the flat, abstracted patterns across the surface of the image. One imagines Atget lugging his massive, heavy camera to this location, setting up the tripod and taking his time to focus before releasing the shutter. |
A response to Atget: Portals
Any wander through the city means encountering a series of openings, doorways or thresholds. These might be the view down a street, a shop doorway, a window display, a corridor or gap in a fence. I've enjoyed looking at Atget's images of such things and decided to try to make a series of similar pictures on a typical walk through the streets of London. London is a very different kind of city to the old Paris that Atget photographed but there's the same tension between old and new and plenty of evidence of gentrification! These pictures were all taken on the same morning during a walk through Bermondsey, south London, with a medium format rangefinder camera on Ilford XP2 Super400 film.
Diptychs & Triptychs
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An imaginary exhibition
I appropriated installation shots from another photographer's website in order to imagine what my own exhibition might look like.
Walking & Noticing
I'm interested in exploring an experience of the city that can be gained from walking through it (like Atget). What categories of things can be noticed and documented in photographs? What strikes me as interesting and worthy of recording? How might these walks be designed? Should I walk randomly, without a clear destination in mind, or should I follow some kind of pattern or route? Do I create my own map by walking where I please or should I impose some kind of order or system on my wanderings? Here are some references that I have found useful in helping me think about walking (and noticing) in the city.
Research: The novels of Paul Auster
Sometimes it seems that we are not going anywhere when we are walking through the city, that we are only looking for a way to pass the time, and that it is only our fatigue that tells us where and when we should stop. But just as one step will inevitably lead to the next step, so it is that one thought inevitably leads to the next thought [...] so that what we are really doing when we walk through the city is thinking, and thinking in such a way that our thoughts compose a journey, and this journey is no more or less than the steps we have taken.
-- Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude
Paul Auster's novels sometimes explore the idea of walking in cities, specifically New York. Cities of Glass (part of The New York Trilogy), for example, deals with a detective (the narrator, who has been mistaken for a private investigator named Paul Auster) who follows a mysterious man through daily rambles across Manhattan. Slowly, he speculates that the man is spelling out a message using the grid pattern of the streets, possibly 'Tower of Babel'. The novel is a kind of metaphysical exploration of the act of writing a story, borrowing from hard-boiled detective fiction, semiotics and the postmodern "death of the author". Fittingly, the story has been turned into a graphic novel.
It might be interesting to borrow this idea of a route which also spells out a word or phrase, capturing pictures of whatever grabs my attention along the way.
Research: Mona Hatoum
The lines drawn on maps in Auster's novel (in both the original publication and the graphic novel version) remind me of Mona Hatoum's work Routes II.
Mona Hatoum’s Routes II is comprised of five colour photocopies of maps taken from airline brochures depicting flight routes. The maps detail networks created by travel, charting the globe primarily according to movement rather than geographic, national, or political boundaries. Using ink and gouache, Hatoum drew coloured lines onto the maps, adding her own hand-drawn abstract designs to the existing webs of the airlines’ routes. Hatoum was born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents [...] She has said that she considers the paths she drew in Routes II to be “routes for the rootless.” |
The pun on routes and roots is an interesting one, and the work takes on extra resonance at the moment given the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine.
A response to Mona Hatoum
I decided to attempt to combine old transport maps of London with pictures I had taken of railway arches in Bermondsey. I like the combination of viewpoints and the way that the maps abstract the original photograph. I also like the fact that over 100 years separates the different images. The arrival of the railway made a massive difference to cities in the 19th century, extending their boundaries and enabling people to move from the centre to the edge (and beyond) more efficiently. They were the engine of the industrial revolution, bringing both incredible wealth and poverty in their wake. Maps tend to be very rational, schematic versions of reality. They are designs imposed on the existing landscape, whereas a photograph, whilst not an entirely trustworthy document, at least records a trace of reality through the light that entered the camera and burned an image onto (in this case) a piece of film. A map and a photograph are both types of sign, both abstractions of a sort.
Research: Francis Alys
Francis Alÿs' practice is diverse, incorporating performance, video, painting and installation. Walking is often a way for him to explore the relationship between people and their environment. Here are two examples of video documents of performances in public places. The 'Paradox of Praxis' is an ongoing series of urban interventions exploring what it means to make something ephemeral. Running a stick across park railings is a simple but beautiful exploration of the hidden music lurking in the everyday urban landscape.
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Alÿs shows us that a walk can be poetic and political - a kind of performance for the camera.
Research: George Perec & the Infra-Ordinary
What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why?
Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare.
-- George Perec, The Infra-Ordinary, 1973
Perec developed the concept of the infra-ordinary as an alternative to the spectacular news of popular media. He felt that people were sleep-walking through their lives, not paying enough attention the mundane details of everyday life. They were seduced by stories of celebrities and disasters, living a kind of fantasy existence. In 'An Attempt to Exhaust A Place in Paris', Perec is sat at a café in the Place Saint-Sulpice over several days, taking an inventory of everything he can see. Here is an extract from Day 1:
Day 1 |
DATE: 6 OCTOBER 1974
TIME: 5:10 PM LOCATION: CAFE DE LA MAIRIE The newspaper kiosk was closed; I didn't find Le Monde; I took a short walk (rue des Canettes, rue du Four, rue Bonaparte): idle beauties swarming into the fashion shops. On rue Bonaparte I looked at the tides of some books on sale, some score windows (antique and modern furniture, used books, drawings and engravings) It's cold, increasingly so it seems to me I am sitting in the Cafe de la Mairie, a little toward the back in relation to the terrace An 86 goes by, empty A 70 goes by, full Jean-Paul Aron goes by, again: he coughs A group of children are playing ball in front of the church A 70 goes by, nearly empty A 6 3 goes by, almost full (why count the buses? probably because they're recognisable and regular: they cut up time, they punctuate the background noise; ultimately, they're foreseeable. The rest seems random, improbable, anarchic... |
Perec takes small journeys, to the cafes and shops near St. Sulpice, but he is mainly interested in observing the journeys of others - on foot and on public transport. He contrasts the regularity of the timetabled bus journeys with the "anarchic", random and unpredictable movements of everything else. I really like this attitude towards the everyday and plan to adopt it during my walks through the city. I am interested in the quality of attention that is part of the process of making photographs. Staying in one place for a decent amount of time and documenting the journeys of others might be an interesting strategy too, an alternative to walking with the camera.
Research: Richard Wentworth
Wentworth is a sculptor who uses photography to document unconscious works of art in city streets:
I find cigarette packets folded up under table legs more monumental than a Henry Moore. Five reasons. Firstly the scale. Secondly, the fingertip manipulation. Thirdly, modesty of both gesture and material. Fourth, its absurdity and fifth, the fact that it works.
His series Making Do and Getting By is a catalogue of things he has seen on his daily walks through the city, things that most people would simply ignore. They are, at once, both totally mundane and magical in their precise utility. They are akin to the objet trouvé of the Surrealists but also a joyous affirmation of everyday creativity.
A response to Richard Wentworth
This is a collection of pictures that I've taken over the last year or so. It's a kind of archive of things I've seen on various walks in London and elsewhere.
Research: Lorenzo Servi (SERRAGLIA)
Servi's series of books entitled The City is Ours, currently runs to 5 volumes, each dealing with a particular feature of the urban landscape. The main intention of the books is to alert people (not unlike George Perec's theory of the Infra-Ordinary) to small details in their surroundings that they might otherwise miss. As we journey through urban landscapes, Servi wants us to lift our heads up from our phone screens, remove our earpods and pay attention!
Responses to Lorenzo Servi
The following set of pictures is taken from my archive and reveals that I seem to have an interest in spilled paint. All of these pictures were taken in the last year or so on my wanderings through the city and on various cameras. I didn't realise quite how many paint splat pictures I had until I started noticing them. I take a lot of pictures and it's often hard to remember what they all depict. In a way, I have been taking a stroll back through my photographs, noticing patterns, in a similar way to walking through the city. What I also like about some of these paint splats is their resemblance to the shapes of countries on a map.
SPILLAGE
TYRES
Three more urban typology of tyres, empty chairs and graffiti removal. Given the number of cars in circulation, it's no wonder that cities tend to accumulate tyres like litter. However, there's something very pleasing about seeing them stacked up outside tyre shops, re-purposed as swing seats and even made into planters. Tyres imply travel even when they are broken and abandoned. Everyone appreciates a quick sit-down on a long walk. These chairs, however, have a distinctly abandoned look about them. The pictures are again taken from my archive of the last couple of years. The removal of graffiti often leads to strangely beautiful unconscious artworks not dissimilar from colour field or abstract expressionist paintings. Matt McCormick has made a very amusing film about the phenomenon.
EMPTY CHAIRS
GRAFFITI REMOVAL
Here are two more small samples (triptychs) of urban typologies from the archive:
MISSING SIGNS
ARROWS
Research: Hannah Platt
Platt's deck of cards features 54 chairs, found and photographed in Naples in the Spring of 2022. Like Michael Wolf's Bastard Chairs, Platt uses the humble chair as a way to document the life and culture of people through their absence. Turning them into a deck of cards is a way to create chance-based combinations of images, engage viewers in collaborative playfulness and, perhaps, encourage them to re-consider their own relationship to the urban environment.
I really like the interactive, chance-based, game element to Platt's work and this is something that I might incorporate into my project in some way. I'm interested in the idea that the viewer takes some control over the editing and sequencing of the images to create a map or route of their own with the available images.
ON THE MOVE
Research: Paul Graham
Paul Graham's book A1 - The Great North Road is a pioneering work of British colour photography. It charts a journey from London to Edinburgh along England's main arterial route (before the building of the motorways). We are given glimpses of the road itself but these are contrasted with the people who love and work long its route and the interiors of roadside architecture. Graham is sensitive to colour combinations and effects of light. Created in the 1980s, Graham uses the road as a kind of metaphor for the state of the nation. The optimism of the post-war years appears to be fading in the face of economic hardship. We associate the road trip with mid-20th century American photography. Unlike the sprawling trips taken by photographers like Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, west from New York to California and back, Graham's trip is focused by a single road and its inexorable trajectory north.
The book was recently reprinted by Mack:
In Paul Graham's series The Great North Road, colour often contradicts the mundane reality of the road. The landscapes, few and far between, are flat and unromantic and the road is primarily depicted through the interiors of the wayside stopping places and service stations. In these places the bright, plastic décor reflects an attempt on the part of the road's inhabitants to stamp their identity on a place which lacks the unity of village or town, and also to alleviate the journeys of their customers. The artificial colour of the interiors contrasts with the more muted colour of the landscapes through which the road passes.
-- Rupert Martin, The Photographers' Gallery website
Research: The films of Chris Petit
Petit's cult classic Radio On (1979) and London Orbital (2004) are films which explore journey's primarily by car, one from London to Bristol, the other around the M25. It might be interesting to combine still photographs and moving image in my exploration of Maps & Routes, maybe also experimenting with a soundtrack for additional atmosphere.
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London Orbital is based on a book by Iain Sinclair. In the clip above, Sinclair refers to the idea of psychogeography. This set of practices might help me explore my relationship to the landscape through which I am moving, either on foot or by public transport.
Research: Joel Meyerowitz
In the late 1960s, Joel Meyerowitz made a long trip by car around Europe, photographing partly through the windscreen. Later, he realised that being in the car was a little like being inside a camera, the windscreen doubling as a viewfinder. The pictures were later exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art. Unlike Paul Graham's large format study of the A1, these images were made with a small rangefinder camera 'on the fly' and with a wide angle lens. They are less studious and more spontaneous; hastily scribbled notes rather than thoughtful essays. The compositions are often wonky and the depth of field quite shallow. Meyerowitz seems to enjoy the visual disruptions, odd perspectives, blurry subjects and strange cropping that sometimes occur as a result.
The old pedestrian's way of seeing the world, which allowed a subject to be walked around and studied and measured against the recollection of similar subjects on other days, seems largely the victim of technological progress. What we see of the world now reaches us as a succession of kaleidoscopic glimpses, Unconnected and unexplained and unconsummated. Joel Meyerowitz drove a car past 20,000 miles of European life and history, each mile of it a mystery to him. With his camera he tried to reach out and touch what he did not understand, and what the exigency of his pace did not allow him to study. Making a photograph was a gesture of recognition to his experience, and later, proof that he had indeed passed such scenes. The pictures he made have to do with the character of photography itself, and with the fragmentation of modern experience, and also with the quality of response of Joel Meyerowitz, who made these irreversible observations while the car was moving.
-- John Szarkowski, MoMA exhibition press release, 1968
Research: Damian Michael Heinisch & Paul Fusco
Damian Michael Heinisch and Paul Fusco have both produced bodes of work exploring views from a moving train. Both are in colour and shot on 35mm. They have both been collected together in award winning books. They both describe real and symbolic journeys exploring themes of history, memory and loss.
45Damian Michal Heinisch's 45 presents three train journeys from three different time periods which are united by the number '45', the age of the three travellers. Travelling a total of 4,323 km, from Doneszk to Oslo, the book begins with a sequence of 35 mm colour, coarse-grained photos taken through train windows. The texts at the end, printed on coloured paper, provide details about the three dramatic journeys and reflecting the troubled histories of the 20th and 21st centuries. The book prompts reflections about migration, forced and otherwise, and the terrible cost of war. The book has a diary-like quality, partly reflected in the choice of papers, printing and binding.
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Robert F. Kennedy's Funeral TrainRobert F. Kennedy was mortally wounded on June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Photographer Paul Fusco accompanied the funeral train that carried the coffin from New York City to Washington D.C., capturing the mourners who lined the tracks on relatively slow Kodachrome film "so that as the light slowly fades during the journey, the crowd seems to dissolve."
"When viewed in sequence, either in the book or as a frieze on a gallery wall, [the photographs] have a powerful cinematic quality, and the sense of the train moving past this spontaneous people's guard of honor is almost hypnotic." -- Parr & Badger |
An initial responseDuring the half term holiday I took a trip to Margate by train. The photograph on the right is a view through the bus window on the journey to the train station in Bromley.
On the way back I decided to take pictures through the train window. It was getting dark so I had to use a relatively long shutter speed and it was almost impossible to plan each shot. The images below are therefore mostly made by chance. I don't think this is something I will repeat any time soon but I do like quite like the blurry, abstracted landscapes and the sense they give of a journey at speed. You can just about make out my reflection in some of the images, making them a kind of self-portrait too. My preference is for exercising a bit more control over my compositions. |
Interestingly, I noticed this post, captioned Into Newark on Amtrak, from James Welling on Instagram on the way home:
Here are some of the pictures I took in Margate:
I like the enigmatic quality of some of these pictures. They are like clues or signs. I was struck by how many of the shops and businesses in Margate were closed and boarded up. Even the beach was relatively empty. I think these pictures hint at this emptiness and absence, of things being unmade.
A more considered response
SOUTH CIRCULARThe South Circular is a major road that runs from the Woolwich Ferry in the east to Kew Bridge in the west. It is largely a sequence of urban streets joined together. Originally planned as a new-build route across South London, construction began in Eltham in 1921 to a high-quality specification. The remainder of the road was supposed to be of a similar standard but it was repeatedly delayed. It has received sustained criticism for congestion and pollution and is one of the least popular roads in Britain.
-- Wikipedia |
My Plan
The South Circular is my local A road. My plan is to travel along the South Circular and make photographs at the stops along the way (like Paul Graham). I live towards the Eastern end of the road so I'd like to travel to its origins in Woolwich before travelling back West as far as I can. I imagine I will need to do this over several weeks and take numerous journeys in stages. Eventually, I'm hoping to be able to travel the whole length of the route. I may take moving image footage and make sound recordings if this seems like an interesting way to document the journeys, but my focus will be on making still photographs. I plan to shoot the project on medium format (6 x 4.5) black and white film. This will help me slow down, look carefully and compose thoughtfully.
Photoshoot #1: Woolwich to Eltham
Contextual research:
I have found the following historical images relating to the South Circular. I will continue to search for others. How different the road looks when there were relatively few cars on it! The image on the left, from the 1930s, shows some ground works in Greenwich (Eltham?) at the start of the purpose-built end of the road. The central image shows the road in Catford at the point where the route incorporates the existing roadway (with various strange twists and turns), quite unlike the original plan which involved purpose-built, rational construction. Unfortunately, the money ran out! The image on the far right does show a traffic jam of sorts, so perhaps the South Circular has always been a congested route.
Here is a side-by-side comparison showing the Furlongs forecourt in the 1950s and how it looks today. The building has been listed by the local authority after it was threatened with demolition. The original signage is still in place but the garage is now a car wash. You can just detect the original checkerboard paving on the forecourt. Furlongs have been a family company in Woolwich since the early 1800s and this site is adjacent to the start (or end) of the South Circular, next to the Woolwich Ferry. In many ways, the fate of this garage is a metaphor for the story of the car and roads in the last 100 years.
This slightly irreverent video, explains the history of London's unfinished motorways and their relationship to the inner ring road of the South Circular. It partly explains why the road is so congested but why it might be a better alternative to the incredibly disruptive super highways that were planned in the 1960s, but never built.
Photoshoot #2: Eltham to Catford
Research: Atlas of Intangibles
I recently discovered this fascinating website which presents the visual and aural evidence gathered from various walks through London. The website combines mapping and infographics in a searchable database of pictures, text and sounds. Visitors can inspect each of the journeys and view the connections between them through sophisticated tagging and hyperlinks. The site explores the psychogeography of the city, using clever coding to represent the multi-layered experience of urban dérives. I particularly like the Typologies section and the ability to explore Sonic Shifts. It might be interesting to gather the sounds of my current explorations on and near the South Circular.
I recently visited The Photographers' Gallery to see work by Raúl Cañibano, The Deutsche Börse prize nominees, Café Royal Books and Bert Hardy. I particularly enjoyed Lebohang Kganye‘s installation and the very moving sound piece by Hrair Sarkissian. Raúl Cañibano has travelled all over Cuba to make his images which have a surreal quality. Photographer Gauri Gill worked alongside painter Rajesh Vangad to create multi-layered documents of Indian village life. Lebohang Kganye‘s installation uses cardboad cut-out characters and objects to explore the impact of migration and the meaning of home for her South African family. Hrair Sarkissian's photographs investigate the empty spaces left behind by victims of violence and the 4 speaker sound piece is a recording of bodies being exhumed. VALIE EXPORT's practice is informed by feminism and attitudes to the female body. Café Royal have published hundreds of small zines dedicated to the celebration of British documentary photography. Bert Hardy is a famous British photographer, known for his depictions of London in the Blitz and the lives of ordinary citizens in the post-war period. His journeys across the globe, armed with his Leica M3, are represented by black and white prints and a colour slide show and reveal his sensitivity to effects of light and the figure in the landscape. I was particularly struck by a portrait of a pregnant 16 year old Scottish girl and a man walking between buildings in Spain. Hardy pioneered the use of the small 35mm camera for reportage and this enabled him to respond more quickly to the events going on around him. His pictures, consequently, have a real vitality and energy whilst also being beautifully composed.
Photoshoot #3: Catford to Tulse Hill
Photoshoot #4: Tulse Hill to Wandsworth
Photoshoot #5: Wandsworth to Sheen
Exhibition and display
Although I haven't quite finished my journey along the South Circular, I'm beginning to imagine ways in which the pictures might be displayed. Obviously, extensive framing is beyond my budget, so I've borrowed an installation shot from the Takuma Nakahira exhibition in Tokyo to illustrate a possible gallery style display:
Dedicated web page
I've been experimenting with mmm, a free environmentally friendly website builder that uses a very simple drag-and-drop interface. I thought it might be an interesting way to present my South Circular images. Here's a link to the site and below is a screen recording of what I have displayed so far:
Photoshoot #6: Sheen to Kew Bridge
Research: Thomas Boivin's Paris
I started to photograph its streets and people as soon as I moved there, and kept photographing for years. Photographing people, above all, was what I found meaningful. Although the photographs hardly depict the city, I find they convey the sensation that I had, walking the streets of Belleville: A mixture of beauty and decay, of joyful moments and sadness, the warm feeling of light and the bitter sweet sensation that one can experience walking around all day, searching for a stranger's eyes.
-- Thomas Boivin
I visited Paris during the Easter holiday and was excited to see this exhibition of Thomas Boivin's work. I love the combination of portraits and cafe still life shots that are the result of the photographer's wanderings through the north-eastern Paris districts of Belleville and Ménilmontant. I particularly admire his responses to natural light and the subtle tones in his prints.
Pictures from the exhibition
I was really pleased to see this show featuring three of Boivin's projects. The prints were exquisitely crafted by the artist. He is super sensitive to people, places and effects of light. I liked the way the images were presented in the space, a mixture of small groups, individual pictures, grids and shelves. I particularly enjoyed the pictures of various fabrics - clothes and shop awnings, for example. Boivin has the ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary in his photographs, a quality I really admire. I also saw some images by Marvin E. Newman.
Photography in Paris
Here are some more shows I saw whilst in Paris:
Pictures from the exhibitions at MEP and Le Bal
In addition to the excellent Annie Ernaux 'Exteriors' show I also saw work by Iris Millot and pictures of fashion model Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn. There was also a small exhibition in the basement gallery devoted to photographs featuring text. I also saw a talk about the Annie Ernaux show at MEP featuring writers and curators discussing the relationship between text and image. The Marine Peixoto show at Le Bal was interesting mainly because I admired the arrangement of the images on the walls.
Pictures of the Mark Steinmetz exhibition
This small selection of portraits (and one stormy landscape) by Mark Steinmetz offered lots to admire. He manages to create a sense of stillness and quiet concentration that suggests a real intensity of looking at his subjects. Some are unaware of being photographed. Others stare back defiantly at the camera, self-possessed despite their youth. Like the Thomas Boivin images, the prints were exquisite!
Pictures of the Jeu de Paume exhibitions
I've seen a few of Tina Modotti's images before but this exhibition presented a huge collection from her relatively short career. I really admired her political commitments and the way she used photograhy to draw attention to the concerns, exploitation and resistance of the poor and oppressed. Her portraits were very striking. I was less interested in the allegorical still life images which seemed a bit obvious. At her best, she seemed able to maintain a commitment to both her formalist training (the precise control of light and composition) whilst also paying close attention to the historical and political importance of her subjects. The Bertille Bak show was intriguing, again offering some interesting ways to present political struggles, especially related to the exploitation of workers, through still and moving images and objects.
Pictures from the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibitions
I loved the Alessandra Sanguinetti show at HCB. I'd only seen a few of the images from the Guille and Belinda series before so it was great to see more prints displayed in such an interesting way. The wall of family archive images was particularly striking and helped to contextualise the contemporary portraits of the cousins. I was struck by the complex mixture of joyful play and sinister details. Life and death seem to always be in close proximity in the Argentinain countryside! There was a lovely, small selection of images by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck which explored some similarities of subject and composition. The Weegee exhibition was very interesting, using the idea of spectatorship and The Society of the Spectacle as a way of exploring the photographer's various interests - crime, death, voyeurism and celebrity, for example. The curators seemed to be suggesting that Weegee had anticipated some of the concerns about capitalism's control of the media and the sinister effects this might have on society that were later picked up and amplified by writers like Guy Debord.
Paris photographs
These photographs were taken with a medium format camera (FujiGS645) and a combination of Kodak Portra 400 and Ilford XP2 Super400 120 film.
Quotations
There is no such thing as a lesser truth. |
He who looks through an open window never sees so many things as he who looks at a shut window. |
Paris Triptychs & Diptychs
Here are a few possible combinations of images. Making diptychs and triptychs is a playful way of thinking through the potential ideas and themes that might exist in a group of pictures.
Paris mapHere is a map of some of the locations I walked to during my trip to Paris. The green marker is the location of the apartment and the red markers represent the galleries I visited. The blue markers are other significant locations - parks, churches, cafés, train stations etc. As you can see from the illustration below, I walked a long way over the 5 days. 20,000 steps is about 10 miles!
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A game of photo snap
After attempting to make a few diptychs I decided to play a game of photo snap. I set up a diptych template in Photoshop and chose a photo randomly. I then paired this with another image, trying to find some kind of visual correspondence between them. I then removed the first image and tried to find a corresponding image for the second picture. I kept going until I ran out of suitable pictures. I then animated these diptychs as a slideshow in iMovie, using Thelonious Monk's version of 'April in Paris' as the soundtrack.
I'm relatively pleased with the result of this experiment. It was a challenge sometimes to find an obvious correspondence between particular images so this encouraged me to look even harder at the details and compositions. I like the playfulness of the sequence and the way that it mixes up the geography of the city. There's also an element of surprise in the pairings which is a bit like the experience of walking though an urban environment. You never quite know what you might encounter next or what will strike you as photographable.
S Circular bookInspired by the design of Thomas Boivin's Belleville, I decided to use Blurb's Bookwright software to lay out my South Circular images in book form. The sequencing is chronological (and geographical) beginning with the Woolwich pictures and tracing the route west of the road to Kew Bridge. The cover uses the typography and colours of UK road signs, hence the green background, the abbreviation of S Circular and the yellow A 205. I have chosen a large square format (30 x 30cm), matt paper with charcoal end papers, linen hardcover and dust jacket.
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My ESA Making Days Plan
Preparations & Resources
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Time Management
Day #1: Darkroom printing and editing
Day #2: Risograph printing
Day #3: Final editing, presentation (e.g. framing and installing) and documentation
Day #2: Risograph printing
Day #3: Final editing, presentation (e.g. framing and installing) and documentation