Leica World 2-2006 Reading Sample_en

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H E I D I B R A D N E R J A M E S W H I T LOW D E L A N O E S T E B A N PA S TO R I N O D I A Z A N D R E W Z . G L I C K M A N B E N E D I C T E L A S SA L L E A N D R E A S M E I C H S N E R TO M A S M U N I TA P I E R R E W I T T PAO LO R OV E R S I

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10 YEARS OF

T H E P R I N T E D PAG E S T E FA N K R U C K E N H AU S E R H O U S TO N F OTO F E S T R E N C O N T R E S D ’A R L E S L E I CA O S K A R B A R N AC K AWA R D P H OTO H I G H L I G H T S 2 0 07 P H OTO M E T R O P O L I S N E W YO R K I N T E RV I E W W I T H P E T E R G A L A S S I L E I CA M 8 HEIDI BRADNER J A M E S W H I T LOW D E L A N O E S T E B A N PA S TO R I N O D I A Z ANDREW Z. GLICKMAN B E N E D I C T E L A S SA L L E ANDREAS MEICHSNER TO M A S M U N I TA

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PIERRE WITT PAO LO R OV E R S I

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SPECIAL NEW YORK

Paul Strand, ‘New York’ 1915, Courtesy Aperture Foundation

Photo - Metropolis Ne w York

THE PL ACE TO BE Let there be no doubt: if you deal with the medium as collector or critic, curator or editor, art buyer or professional photographer, you cannot ignore New York. This is where trends are created, and prices. For 20th century photoart at any rate, New York remains the place to be.

Edward Steichen, ‘The Flatiron’, New York 1905, Courtesy Aperture Foundation

O N A M E R I C A’ S LE F T W I N G - LI B E R A L east coast, where the Hudson meets the Atlantic, is New York, a city whose size and population of more than eight million, whose pulsating business and cultural life make it one of the world’s few true metropolises. Architecturally and structurally it is the 20th century’s first modern city. It is also the place where a modern medium like photography has a presence unparalleled throughout the world. So New York is not only a center within the USA, but also in a global sense. To date, its number of museums, galleries, agencies, publishing companies and other institutional and commercial facilities concentrating on the photographic image is beyond compare, as is the high level, the matter-of-course and the professionalism of people’s approach to photography. Certainly one reason for this is that, soon after the first practicable method had been announced in 1839, the medium became very popular in the New World – as regards its creative use as well as its marketing, publication and reception.

Although New York claims the role of the USA’s leading cultural city for itself, it does not have a single museum that is dedicated exclusively to the medium of photography. But the city is distinguished by a number of world-famous museums and institutions where photography is collected, exhibited and communicated. One of the most famous is without doubt the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Midtown Manhattan on 53rd Street and not far from the famous Fifth Avenue. When it was established in 1929, the avowed aim of its initia-

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tors – three progressive and influential patrons of the arts, Miss Lillie P. Bliss, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan – was to reshape the conservative museum scene and create a location for modern art. Under founding director Alfred H. Barr, who operated with an extended concept of art oriented on the Bauhaus curriculum, a structure was created for the first time that included separate departments for architecture and design, film and video, and photography – along with the ‘classical’ ones for paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and illustrated books. In 1933, with Walker Evans’ photographs of Victorian houses, the museum exhibited photography for the first time. The Department of Photography was established in 1940 – the first in the world at an art museum. The curator to be appointed was Beaumont Newhall, who was one of the few art historians at the time who understood the medium as a means of personal expression and advocated this approach in his epoch-making exhibition Photography1839 –1937.

(His [art] History of Photography became a standard work). Other personalities followed, for example, in 1947, Edward Steichen, a leading representative of pictorialism, and in later years a prominent fashion and advertising photographer. With the The Family of Man he conceived, and was curator of, probably the “most successful [photo] exhibition of all times” (Philipp). The exhibition, a production schooled in modern magazine layout in the service of an ‘ideology of a humanist universalism’, opened on January 24, 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art and was afterwards presented in 69 countries and at 85 locations.

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HOUSTON

HOUSTON / ESTEBAN PASTORINO DIAZ

Houston Fotofest

AH YES , REALIT Y Houston seems a long way off, but the trip is worth the effort. It is not the famous stars who are celebrated here. It is the emerging artists who are presented at the Fotofest. Every kind of visual strategy is pursued, without adhering to one single restrictive concept. A link to the problems of this world, however, is not unwelcome.

O N E W O U LD N OT B E FA R wrong in associating the name of Houston, Texas, with high-tech, cattle and folklore, even if this is not the entire story. Houston also stands for art and culture, mainly on account of a wealthy upper class with an interest in art. Aficionados of surrealistic art are well acquainted with the Menil Collection, which has probably the world’s largest number of Magritte paintings. Those interested in photographs have heard of the Museum of Fine Arts, which quite recently acquired the superb Manfred Heiting Collection (cf. p. 9). The problem is that Houston is not necessarily on the roadmap of international art tourism, a fact that had also to be taken into consideration when it came to establishing a photo festival in America’s fourth biggest city. Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss, both prominent photojournalists, now retired, had to come up with something special if they intended to attract attention and tempt a public with an interest in photography into coming to Houston. Their concept was as follows: we do not show what is shown in New York, for example. And we give young photographers a genuine chance to make a name for themselves.

‘Start-up’ is the word that springs to mind. And with their ‘Meeting Place’, that is, the portfolio reviews that are held here, the initiators in fact set a genuine standard that meanwhile has its imitators from Arles to Birmingham.

Houston is the festival for discovering mostly young or contemporary photographers, a fact also true of this thirteenth edition of the biennial – again supported by Leica Camera. Once again the slightly more than forty exhibitions had been subsumed under one or rather two topics that only at first glance had nothing to do with each other: the environment (‘The Earth’), and art and violence (‘Artists Responding to Violence’). There were also various sideshows, for example, the Discovery Show showing the finds of the last festival. One of these is the young Argentinean photographer, Esteban Pastorino Díaz. Díaz is an example of the new generation of photographers who are no longer concerned simply with well seen, beautiful pictures, but – against the background of a changed media world – with questions of seeing and the perception of reality. From a technical point of view, his large-format photographs are aerial pictures taken from heights of 15 to 120 metres and acquire a distinctly surreal touch owing to the angle of vision and a deliberately selected partial sharpness of focus. One might speak of a ‘Gulliver’ effect that not only makes big things appear small, in other words miniaturises our world in an amazing way, but also compels us to look anew at familiar objects by suddenly bringing them irritatingly into focus and leaving the rest of the picture blurred.

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A young British Leica photographer who has already made a name for herself in the world of photography is Heidi Bradner, who presented herself at a well arranged exhibition with an essay about the Nenets, a nomadic people in northern Siberia. Looking at the pictures one might be reminded of Ragnar Axelsson or Claudine Doury, and this impression is not so wrong. Their reports are also dedicated to a life under extreme conditions, in snow and ice. And there is something else this new generation of young documentary photographers has in common: their commitment to the Leica system, which never fails to work even at extremely low temperatures: “I used my Leica in storms”, says Heidi Bradner, “because it just kept working even though I had snowdrifts on my camera.” What distinguishes Bradner’s essay is the closeness, spiritual and real, to a people that has completely submitted its life’s rhythm to nature. In quiet, well constructed pictures, Bradner tells of a frugal life far away from what we usually refer to as civilisation, proving not least that, even in the era of the jet and the Internet there exists – in the best sense of the word – ‘something foreign’ that is worth exploring with conventional means.

Andrew Z. Glickman is the name of our discovery at the portfolio reviews. The young American presented himself, strictly speaking, with a topic that is not exactly brand new. Walker Evans had already photographed people using public transport. Luc Delahaye did the same a while ago. ‘Leica World’ readers will also remember the portfolios of Tom Wood and Luis Mallo. What distinguishes Glickman is that he does not come as a stranger or an artist or a photographer. He comes as a participant, not looking for the exceptional but the normal.

Glickman, who lives in Washington, uses the subway every day to go to his office. Like Wood he has also made a virtue of necessity and turns the ride underground into a photographic challenge. Equipped with the discreet Leica M he seeks, not the bizarre, not the event, but the ‘study’, as Roland Barthes has it; in other words that cool naturalness which – pictured so plainly and clearly – appears artificially staged. Thematically and stylistically Díaz, Bradner, Glickman may go different ways. What they stand for is a critical interest in our reality.

And in a photographic art that does not derive its possibilities from the computer. hmk This year’s Fotofest was held from March 10 to April 23. The 14th edition of the festival, which is supported by Leica Camera AG, is planned for the beginning of 2008. www.fotofest.org

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ARLES

ARLES / BENEDICTE LASSALLE

Rencontres d’Arles

SO WHERE THEN IS HAPPINESS TO BE FOUND? What concerns the new generation of photographers in particular? The annual Rencontres d’Arles, with their exhibitions and projections, and the portfolio reviews, now something of an institution, are a perfect guide to current trends in the language of pictures and the choice of themes.

far to go to find her subject. Bénédicte Lassalle, a young Leica photographer in Paris and graduate of the private Centre Iris photographers’ school, explored her grandmother’s kitchen. That does not sound exactly spectacular. But haven’t we learned from the movies how the mildest and gentlest of stories can trigger the most devastating emotional aftershock? What do we see? An artificial hand on the kitchen table, the battered legs of which disappear into the blur.

A kitchen clock on floral-pattern wallpaper, the hands pointing to twelve. A well-worn apron. A brush with a barcode that somebody forgot to remove. And, finally, a cracked sink you can tell has seen more than its fair share of dirty dishes. These are signs of a life lived out, metaphors of a yesterday that knows no tomorrow. This was home to someone whose time is up. What was broken is no longer repaired, what was used up no longer replaced. The very objects breathe exhaustion. Some day, in the not too distant future, someone is bound to come and dispose of these mute companions of an existence that was.

For one last time the photographer has recorded a condition that is familiar and yet under threat: someone close, reflected only in the mirror of her belongings.

Bénédicte Lassalle was not, not yet, part of the official festival programme. But calling attention to young talents beyond the compass of the exhibitions, colloquia, workshops and projections – this, too, is typical of the Rencontres d’Arles: not by chance does the title include the word ‘meetings’. Incidentally, Arles 2006 was marked by the presence of those old ‘Compagnons de Route’, who had come at the invitation of Raymond Depardon, this year’s artistic director of the Rencontres d’Arles. Among them was Leica photographer Guy Le Querrec, whose multi-facetted work, where jazz meets reportage, many people have yet to discover. Or Jean Gaumy, whose dramatic exploration of the sea must be counted among the most exceptional achievements of contemporary Leica photography. Or Claudine Doury, one of the younger generation of dedicated Leica photographers: she, too, is a sensitive observer of non-European cultures.

One of the traditional items on the agenda is the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, where the winner is presented, along with the finalists, at an evening projection. The winner of this year’s competition was Tomás Munita, who was born in Santiago (Chile) in 1975, proving once more that unknown photographers, especially the younger ones, have a real chance of winning this award. The only thing that counts is the quality in a coherent, self-contained series. ‘Kabul – Leaving the Shadows’ was the title Munita gave to a work created between March and November 2005, while he was working as a correspondent for The Associated Press news agency in Afghanistan. What he shows is everyday life in a country that is still far away from peace, but nevertheless also enjoys its moments of civilian life. Munita consistently exploits the possibilities of modern colour photography, relying on the drama

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of light to find atmospheric formulas that can be read as highly personal statements in a pictorial language that sometimes borders on abstraction; statements also in opposition to the customised deluge of pictures in our media. On the other hand, the intention of photographer James Whitlow Delano, who lives in Japan, is to overcome the usual patterns of seeing. In a combination of the Leica M and highly sensitive black-and-white film, he has found the technical means for getting closer, in pictorial terms, to the foreign country he has chosen.

Japan, a cosmos between tradition and modernity, may for a start be read as a great conundrum. Delano’s complex, sometimes perfunctory, pictorial language emphasises the enigmatic nature of a culture that is both fascinating and different, familiar and sometimes irritating.

What is happiness, or rather is anywhere its home? The ancient Greeks knew the way to paradise, which they called Arcadia and which could be found in the highlands of the Peloponnese. A place whose daily challenges amounted to nothing more than tending sheep and which otherwise was free of any kind of earthly demands. The technological era, accustomed to doing what is feasible, creates its own untimely paradises and Andreas Meichsner shows us what they look like. The Berlin photographer, a graduate of the Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Leica Oskar Barnack Award finalist, has found ‘his’ Arcadia in Holland: a holiday village whose standardised architecture seems to regiment and control the activities of the people who live there. Leisure time as an industrial product, holidays off the peg. One could call Meichsner’s work a conceptual report – nothing, as he emphasises, is staged. In short, work with a claim to being documentary that asks questions about individuality and conformity – without suppressing the moment of irony. And one more finalist: Pierre Witt, 41 years old, graduate of the École Nationale Louis Lumière in Paris and a freelance photographer since the late 80s. His photographic work focuses on the exploration of traditional forms of living, or rather their crisis, against the background of ever-increasing technicalisation, automation, urbanisation and globalisation. This is also true of the essay he submitted that examines the life, present and future, of the mountain farmers in the Vanoise. Life in the Haute Savoie has always been one of privation – and the work hard. Only that today nobody is prepared to do it any more. In Pierre Witt’s calm, sober pictures, the eye is drawn to a world on the way out and a life in the mountains – far away from the ski slopes and the folklore. Incidentally, the response to the projection from the traditionally critical Arles audience was almost frenetic. Photography pure and simple. hmk Entries are now being accepted for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2007.

The deadline for entries is the 31st January. Further information online at www.leica-camera.com

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