Helen Levitt - fifty years of New York street photography

 

Helen Levitt was a native New Yorker, born in Brooklyn in 1913, and remained in the city until her death aged 95 in 2009. A quiet and introspective woman who never married she rarely sought fame or fortune but spent nearly seventy years photographing the streets of the city. She dropped out of school and learned to develop photographs in a darkroom before starting work for the commercial photographer J Florian Mitchell.

She first realised that photography could be art as well as commercial when she visited and exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Julien Levy Gallery. The show influenced her work for many years and she began using her mother's friends as models using a second-hand Voigtlander camera. She even met Cartier-Bresson in New York and spent a day shooting on the streets with him later in life as her reputation was established.

Teaching children art in the mid-1930's she became interested in the chalk drawings many drew on the streeets at the time and started photographing them with her new Leica. The results were not published until 1987 in a book "In The Street: chalk drawings and messages NYC 1938-1948". But her interest in street photography was born and she continued taking pictures in the Manhatten districts. The lack of TV and air conditioning meant that people lived a large part of their lives on the streets. Later she would bemoan the loss of children outdoors saying "Children used to be outside. Now the streets are empty. People are indoors looking at television or something".

Her work was first published in Fortune magazine in 1939 and she received a grant from MOMA in 1946. Meeting the photographer James Agee through Walker Evans she was persuaded to try colour and from the 1950's onward shot in both colour and black and white feeling equally at ease with both. This pioneering work in colour was recognised by the Guggenheim Foundation in 1959 and 1960. Yet, while she had a strong reputation she remained pretty much unknown outside the photographic world and rarely gave interviews or talked about her work or motivations.

By 1965 her first major publication "A Way of Seeing" was published. Sadly much of her colour work up to this time was stolen in a burglary of her apartment in 1970. Arguably her most influential work was not published until 2005, "Slide Show: The Colour Photographs of Helen Levitt". She became a Fellow of the National Endowment of the Arts in America in 1976 and in 1988 a peer award from The Friends of Photography in California. Less known and recognised was the work she undertook on films, mainly documnetary, which included editing with Luis Bunuel. 

Her reputation grew during the 1990's and into the 21st Century and she is now recognised as one of the leading street photographers of her time and a pioneer of colour work and of the New York School of photographers alongside Saul Leiter and William Eggleston. Sadly, like many women photographers she has had to wait quite a while for her reputation to grow and for her work to now be collected and feted with retrospectives. Luckily for us (pandemic allowing) we will be able to see her work at the Photographers Gallery in November 2021 https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/ 

You can see more on her life and work on these sites :-

https://www.lensculture.com/articles/helen-levitt-helen-levitt-new-york-streets-1938-to-1990s

https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/helen-levitt?all/all/all/all/0 

Artsnet

Ruud van Empel - Extreme Photoshopping

 

Ruud van Empel (seen above with one of his tree compositions at Beetles Huxley Gallery in London) is a Dutch photographer whose collaged approach is demanding and unique. Born in 1958 in Breda in the Netherlands he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Breda between 1976 and 1981. He now lives and works in Amsterdam. His wok is sold and exhibited world wide and he has pieces in many international museums and art galleries.

After leaving college he started to create a new realism with the many photographs he took using traditional cut and paste techniques with some re-touching. It is fair to say that he re-invented photography at this time, adding a genre that did not really exist in the manner in which he explored it. He continued with this method into the 1990's but switched to digital processing in 1995.

Unlike some who try to achieve a surreal approach in his finished pieces he wants to maintain a naturalistic realism in his work, even when the juxtapositions seem odd. He is constantly taking pictures to work with and, whilst many of his pieces consider the natural surroundings, he often uses people and especially children in his work.

 Highly contrived and vividly coloured, van Empel’s photographs evoke the theatrical and uncanny, mirroring scenes we recognise with a disturbing, dreamlike quality. Birds and butterflies appear in odd sizes as part of a forest scene and yet the scenes are familiar to us.

The detail and care taken in the placement of objects, in the creation of light and space as well as the careful colouring shows how intensely his pictures are worked. You can find out more at his website https://ruudvanempel.nl/ 

 ...and here with a short video of him at work thanks to his London representatives Huxley Parlour Gallery https://huxleyparlour.com/artists/ruud-van-empel/ 

Great British - John Blakemore

 

There are probably few living photographers who have been as influential as John Blakemore over the years. Yet his star does not burn as brightly as Bailey, McCullin or Parr, whom most people would name immediately. 

Blakemore was born in 1936 and discovered photography while on national service with the RAF in Aden. Self-taught, as most people were at that time, he returned to his hometown of Coventry determined to record the re-construction of the city. He had become inspired by Edward Steichen's "The Family of Man" which he had seen in a copy of Picture Post sent by his mother while abroad.

He worked as a photographer initially for Black Star agency and then in a number of studios producing portraits and commercial work. He also became a printer of black and white photographs - of which he has become a master over the years learning, and using, the Zone System made famous by Ansel Adams

After a spell as a photographer at Courtaulds he left Coventry and joined his friend Richard Sadler as a lecturer of creative photography at Derby College of Art, later becoming Emeritus Professor of Photography at Derby University where he taught from 1970 until 2001.

Landscapes and still life are his main subjects and he is known for his handmade books, many of which are now in his archive in the Library of Birmingham. He has consistently championed the British countryside and landscape, working in the same small areas for many years to develop a close relationship and understanding of them. Working mainly in black and white he says that "the silver print is my chosen and primary means of expression". His book, "John Blakemore's Black and White Photography Workshop" is still held as a masterclass in landscape work. His landscape work has been described as richly nuanced which comes, at least aprtly from his printing techniques.

He is also famous for photographing tulips for over a decade of which he says "The tulip journey, then, was ultimately a visual journey, an investigation and discovery of visual possibilities. The tulip became an object of attention and fascination. It became both text and pretext for an activity of picture-making. The photographs are not finally, or not primarily, about tulips: they contain tulips. To say this is not to diminish the role of the tulip. Had the vase of flowers on the table when I made the first tentative exposures exploring the space of my kitchen been, let’s say daffodils, then the journey, if it had ever begun, would in all probability have been shorter. The daffodil, although it is a delightful flower, exhibits a stubborn rigidity of form; it lives and dies at attention. The tulip, however, is a flower of constant metamorphosis; it stretches towards the light and gestures to occupy the space." And that observation, perhaps, say what all photography is about.

You can visit his website here :- https://www.johnblakemore.co.uk/ 

There is also a recorded talk by him presenting his work from 1955 - 2016 at the Meeting of Minds conference in 2017 here;- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa8woJC-0lg

In My Room - a book of intimate photographs by Saul Leiter

 

Saul Leiter is known to many as one of the original New York street photographers, and notably one of the first to use colour film during the 1950's. What some may not know is that during his life he shot thousands of mono pictures of his wives, lovers and friends in his flat and small studio on East 10th Street.

In this excellent book "In My Room", with an introduction by Carole Naggar and afterword by Robert Benson, are shown a very small sample from this collection. In his afterword Benson writes "The women in these photographs are unguarded: they are naked, not nude......They are just out there, these women, frail, beautiful and deeply human." The intimacy with which Leiter worked is clear and palpable. The models are people he knows, and who trust him, which could explain why they were viewed as so private. Shot between 1952 and the early seventies they use natural light, which softens them and gives an almost accidental feel. 

They could be voyeuristic apart from the fact that we know they were shot with complicity from those involved. Many just show the preparations for everyday life. Others are more sensuous and personal. All feel as though you are being allowed into a small private world of tenderness. They could never be described as salacious. Rather they are uninhibited. The pictures are massively different from the very controlled portraits and fashion shoots he did for Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, Esquire and other top magazines with experienced models.

Some are almost abstractions which his use of black and white allows. many hold the feeling of his love for Japanese art, as he himself first studied painting.

In her introduction Naggar says "Leiter's nudes have a spontaneous and romantic quality, like the scattered pages of a diary, or stills from early movies.......Leiter's gaze is not that of the typical male: the women can be in turn shy, aggressive, or playful, but they are always partners and full participants in a give-and-take...". 

For anyone wishing to photograph women there are some wonderful lessons to be learned here about closeness and trust.

"In My Room" by Saul Leiter with an introduction by Carole Naggar and an afterword by Robert Benton is published by Steidl (ISBN 978-3-95829-103-4). 

An interview with Margit Erb of the Saul Leiter Foundation about the work can be seen here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yz-301syQ0 

Contemporary Japanese photography

 

Untitled - Daido Moriyama

Despite many of our cameras coming from Japan Western photographers do not often explore the photographs made there. I think it is well worth it as the cultural differences, the social history and the intentions of some photographic practice in Japan make it a place from which we can inform our practice.

                                                                Sans Titre - Nobuyoshi Araki

The two symbols used to represent photography (shashin) in Japanese first related to art. Sha means to copy and shin truth. So the word originally applied to the realism in Western Art. As a ban in imports and exports was in place in Japan during the Edo period (which ended in 1868) it was difficult to find a camera in Japan. Sometime after that date the word was applied to photographs and has stuck. So photography was viewed as making a true image.

                                                            from - Seascapes - Hiroshi Sigumoto

During the early twentieth century Japanese photography was mainly concerned with developing documentary styles which somewhat mirrored the concept of recording true images and influenced by photojournalism in the USA. Some surrealism began to creep in with European influences as well. 

from Illuminance - Rinko Kawachi

This development stopped during the second world war. After that photography in Japan turned to a different sensitivity completely and started to record and explore the aftermath of Nagasaki and Hiroshima alongside the upheavals in cultural norms, greater Western influence and the rapid development of industry and selling to world markets, including leading camera brands from Canon and Nikon to Fujifilm and Sigma. Street photography grew in prominence during this time. This new style was called sunappu shotto  or snapshot and was rough and ready, sometimes out of focus or blurred.

Untitled - Naoya Hatakey

In Japanese photography 1968 has become known as Year Zero. One of the most important events during this time was the establishment of a photography magazine, Provoke, which although it only lasted for three issues, provided a new focus for what photography might achieve as well as a showcase for the existing work of the time. The magazine spurred an exhibition of photographs in Tokyo, where photo galleries had been slow to develop, called 100 Years: A History of Photographic Expression by the Japanese. It indirectly led to the 1974 MOMA exhibition New Japanese Photography in New York, thus bringing the changes to an international audience

Untitled (long exposure series) - Tokihiro Sato

By the 1990's women had grown to be a prominement influence in photography and their concerns tended to be very different to those of the men who had proceded them.  Concerned with their social standing, changing role and self image women brought a new and different aesthetic to imagery. Gradually, with this influence, photographers became more sensitive to surroundings, feelings and emotion as well as social issues.

Composition of Air - Gen Aihara

Japan has always had a strong feeling for artistic expression and gradually the minimalism showing in haiku and the social lessons from Hokusai prints or the minutiae which focussed the development of netsuki found there way into photography. It is now finding it's feet on the world stage after a slow start....

Untitled from Liquid Dreams 2 - Mika Ninagawa

There are plenty of places to explore this topic further and here are a couple of links to help get you started :-

https://time.com/4035308/japanese-photography/

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/06/27/arts/what-provoked-japans-contemporary-photography/

RIP - Chris Killip

 

Photograph by Kent Rodzwicz

A British photographer died last week at the age of 74. He was Chris Killip and had been suffering from cancer. I was sad to hear this as he was a formative influence for me, even though my style is nothing like his. His gritty black and white pictures of working class life in the North-East of England and of the community in Skinningrove on the high North Yorkshire coast taught me a lot about how life was at the time and what to look for in a picture. Of course he photographed more than that, including portraiture as well as in Ireland, but these were the pictures which stuck with me.

Born in the Isle of Man in 1946 he worked as an assistant to commercial photographers in London during the 1960's and early 70's, having some early success and attracting funding for his work through the Arts Council in the form of a commission to photograph the market towns of Huddersfield and Bury St Edmunds in England for the exhibition “Two Views—Two Cities” at Huddersfield City Art Gallery and Bury St. Edmunds Art Gallery. In 1975, he was awarded a two-year fellowship through which he would photograph England’s northeast. Killip also directed Side Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne where he lived from 1977 to 1979. He said of the people in his pictures "They are at the tough end of things, the people in my photographs. It’s about the struggle for work, being out of work, fighting for work." He had never taken a photograph before he became a photographer at 17, inspired by a Cartier-Bresson photo he saw in Paris Match magazine.

These were the days before digital photography and most of his work was taken on a large format 5x4 camera - a big piece of kit to carry round that made him very visible. Probably his best known work was a series of photographs taken between 1973 and 1985 and published under the title In Flagrante and showing the impact of the deindustrialisation on people as it happened. Killip himself said of the book "History is what's written, my photographs are what happened". Martin Parr, a contemporary and friend of Killip, has said that he was "without a doubt one of the key players in postwar British photography.”

Despite Creative Camera Magazine recognising the importance of his work and giving his work an entire issue in 1977 Killip failed to gain the recognisition he deserved on Britain and moved to the United States where he was the Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University for 26 years. His major retrospective took place in the Folkwang Museum in Essen in 2012. 2018 however saw the publication of four books of earlier photographs in the UK. Some recognition at last. These are now difficult to obtain and expensive if you do find them...

It was his pictures of Skinningrove and Seacoal Beach which first drew my attention to his work as I had visited Skinningrove during the early 60's during a holiday in Staithes and later returned when I moved to the Humberside area in the early 1990's. There was not much there apart from terraces of houses and a beach. Seacoal was further north which, in the 60's still had coal on it that people collected and sold. It seemed to me that he had caught the whole spirit of these places which were desperate, forgotten and yet spirited and defiant and with a massive sense of community.

RIP Chris Killick and thanks for the unwritten history.

Shirin Neshat -

 

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian visual artist best known for her work in photography, video, and film (such as her 1999 film Rapture),which explore the relationship between women and the religious and cultural value systems of Islam. Born into the small and conservative town of Quazvin in 1957 she had little connection to the art world until attending University of California at Berkeley for her final year of high school. There she discovered Western artists and was drawn to women like Frida Kahlo, Eva Hesse and Judy Chicago. She applied for, and was accepted onto, the Graduate Art Course at Berkeley but while there the Iranian Revolution robbed her of her immigration status and could not return to Iran. She moved to New York and started work in Storefront for Art and Architecture with her then husband. The ten years she spent there she attributes her art education to.

She eventually received US citizenship and felt confident enough to return to Iran and visit her family, an experience which was significant in how she saw the world, herself and the role of women in Islam. Much of her work started at this point as she explored the culture and relationships she experienced. She often uses writing as a part of the photograph to explore her themes.

She has said that she hopes the viewers of her work “take away with them not some heavy political statement, but something that really touches them on the most emotional level.” While her early photographs were overtly political, her film narratives tend to be more abstract, focusing around themes of gender, identity, and society. Her Women of Allah series, created in the mid-1990s, introduced themes of the discrepancies of public and private identities in both Iranian and Western cultures. The split-screened video Turbulent (1998) won Neshat the First International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999. The artist currently lives and works in New York. Her works are included in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

For me her work is rewarding because it relies heavily on metaphor. The diffierences shown in the public and private attitudes to men and wormen, to exposure and concealment and the delicate line and balance that many people have to  follow in their lives to survive, something we can easily forget in Western culture, whether politically or personally.

You can find out more about Shirin's work here :- 

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-shirin-neshat-path-art-school-outcast-contemporary-art-icon

Here her TED Talk here:- 

https://www.ted.com/talks/shirin_neshat_art_in_exile?language=en 

or watch her 17 minute film Roja here :-

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/video/shirin-neshat-roja-exclusive 

My Influences - Cig Harvey

Cig Harvey

Back in July I wrote a review for a book (her third monograph) called "You an Orchestra You a Bomb" by Cig Harvey and said a little about her. This time she has a whole blog to herself. 

I first came across Cig's work online when I discovered some of her early work around the time of her second monograph "Gardening at Night" although by then she had already shown work a number of times in both solo and group shows starting in 2000. I was impressed with her monotone work although most of her pictures are in colour and in fact colour is immensely important to her. Her work often shows edges, hints, and segments;  small pieces which allowed you to wonder and it was this storytelling element of her work that I found attractive. She herself has said that she is influenced by magic realism and has attracted comments comparing her work to that of Rene Magritte.

Looking further I found a long interview with her which was a talk recorded at The School for Visual Arts in New York. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUG-JYvcMwk ). At over an hour it will tell you as much as you need to know up until 2014 when it was recorded. It is never boring and shows many of her early pictures as she discusses motivation rather than technique.

Cig is English and was born in Devon in 1973 but later travelled abroad, working in different countries before settling in the USA where she still lives in Rockport in Maine.

Her first monograph "You Look at me Like an Emergency" was published in 2012 and all her books are now collectors pieces, partly because they are produced in limited numbers by a specialist company in Rockport where she lives. 

She has received many awards and recognition for her work in the intervening years. In 2018 she was named the 2018 Prix Virginia Laureate, an international photography prize awarded to one woman each year. Her recent work has been largely centred on family and firends with some echoes of Sally Mann. Where she will go next is less certain I feel but she is certainly a photographer to watch for me. 

Here is her website to browse https://www.cigharvey.com/ 

Don McCullin - His exhibition at Tate Liverpool (Sept 20 - May 21)

 

Don McCullin is arguably the best known living photographer in Britain today. Few can come close to either his output or the scope of his work. Now in his mid-eighties and still working hard he has covered most genres in his work as a photojournalist and in his own, more gentle work, in later age.

Born into a deprived childhood in London he left school at fifteen and later did his National Service in the RAF, where he discovered photography. and saved for his first Rolleicord camera. Back in London he photographed some local gang members in a bombed out building and was advised to send the pictures to The Observer who promptly published them, setting him on his road through photojournalism, initially with The Sunday Times. He covered homelessness in London, Northern Ireland during The Troubles, The Biafran famine, civil war in Cyprus and most famously Vietnam where his reflective, frank, hard-hitting style caught people's imagination. During this period his attention was always on the people involved, the storytelling, narrative aspects of the situation.

Since then he has photographed the Beatles, travelled widely in Africa and the Middle East where he recorded the ruins of Palmyra prior to ISIS decimating the site (which he later returned to with Dan Cruikshank the historian to record the damage caused for a TV programme) become a CBE and been knighted. A 2012 documentary McCullin by David and Jacqui Morris was nominated for two Baftas.

He now lives in Somerset and has been recording much of his local area in his landscapes which he says "My landscapes are dark. People say: “Your landscapes are almost bordering on warscapes.” I’m still trying to escape the darkness that’s inside me. There’s a lot of darkness in me. I can be quite jovial and jokey and things like that, but when it comes down to the serious business of humanity, I cannot squander other people’s lives." That says much for the humanity of a man who has seen the worst of the world.

Now a new exhibition shows his amazing Tate Britain Retrospective from 2019 at Tate Liverpool. The show opens on 16th September 2020 and runs until 9th May 2021. Tickets must be purchased online and are timed so that the one-way system to help deal with Covid works for the safety of all. Over 250 works assembled over 60 years and all printed by McCullin in his darkroom are on display. Despite visiting the show in Londo I am keen to see it again and look forward to a visit during the run.