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‘Crash’

Gagosian Gallery London, Exhibition.

11^th February – 1^st April 2010.

Spring is upon us boys and girls!

I bathed in the morning glow drinking coffee before taking a pew on this exhibition last week and what an operation it was!

‘Crash’ is a major exhibition curated by the Gagosian group to bring together some of the most revered image makers of the century is a homage to the prolific influential author J.G Ballard. Resolute to his most seminal novel under the title ‘Crash’, written in 1973, about a group of car crash victims who try to recreate heightened sexual stimulus by recreating car crashes. You getting the picture? How about that one!!

The novel is now considered to be up there with the best visionary off the wall pieces of writing of all time, sitting up there with the likes of George Orwell and Franz Kafka. Sadly Ballard past away in 2009 and now the gallery has decided to curate a group of artists who all explore iconography of Ballardian greatness!

Inside this beautiful show you can see some great photography by Dan Holsworth, Helmut Newton, Cindy Sherman and Rachel Whiteread. The common denominator being that they all adopt a strict sense of dystopic lynchian ambience. Space and destruction become defining elements in the work. Moving away from the picturesque lure, we are sometimes confronted with the brutality of human cultivation akin to the Ballard’s hopeless landscape.

Along side these great photographers also sit an impressive list of artists like Francis Bacon, Hans Bellmer, Jake & Dino Chapman, Edward Hopper, Ed Rushca, Andy Warhol and Jenny Saville. I don’t foresee that it gets much better than that!

Here's a passage from J.G Ballards book – The Drowned World. Humans have desecrated the planet and global warming has hit its peak! One scientist explores the relationship between chaotic mess and the dreams of man. 

"However selective the conscious mind may be, most biological memories are unpleasant ones, echoes of danger and terror. Nothing endures for so long as fear. Everywhere in nature one sees evidence of innate releasing mechanisms literally millions of years old, which have lain dormant through thousands of generations but retained their power undiminished...and how else can you explain the universal but completely groundless loathing of the spider, only one species of which has ever been known to sting or equally surprising - in view of their comparative rarity - hatred of snakes and reptiles? simply because we all carry within us submerged memory of the time when the giant spiders were lethal, and when the reptiles were the planet's dominant life form"

There's a thought... 

A Single Man ( film )   2009

Director:  Tom Ford

Written Novel:  Christopher Isherwood

We're not ones to bask in the theatrical light of fashion at Photography & Mash but we somehow got roped into watching a film that falls in this exact arena. Never saying no to anything. It came at an apt time when London fashion week was in full swing and you couldn’t step outside the door without being veiled by self consciousness, walking past the self ashore fashion crowd in the lively east end and then stepping into the bee-hive of Saint Martins first years, it felt like it was going to bring all this into one big fat Hollywood spaghetti bowl filmic ore!

Much to my delight it never felt like it was trying to touch on this cult and remarkable pulls away from what one would expect from Tom Ford.  The narrative to the story portrays an intellectual gay man having an intellectual relationship with his student which moves ideas around gay people, in fashion, away from the typical cliche & cute; images that have so frequently debase elements of the gay community.

The story is modelled on the classic love setting but try’s to work on a more sophisticated level which it failsi to achieve. Ford try’s to give a romantic image of death throughout the story intertwined with a love scenario feels somewhat Romeo and Juilet  all over again, but clearly not as good as the original.  The sophistication is further forced into the film when we vision the tutor reading Franz Kafka’s – Metamorphosis, we are led to believe that the whole plot is a giant leap in visioning the world, but it simply over bakes the cake and doesn’t live in the same fields as ‘Metamorphosis’

However FULL marks for the cinema photography which pulls this image back to a credible standard for the director. There is some divine imagery within this film. The colour palette is bang on and it’s the first fashiony imagery I’ve seen for a long time that feels real and possible. It does draw on the palette of Stephen shore that 1960’s – 70’s American tone which makes it appealing to photographers. We have heard criticism by some friends that it felt like one long ‘Gucci’ advertisement but this is simply is not true. It’s not overworked like most of these ads, it survives on the integrity of the image much more.

The best scene in the film is set on a beach where the camera switches to black & white, we are thrown right back into a Edward Western image as the seen unfolds with its own twists and tweaks. It’s a astonishing scene and deserves to be credited. All round its really worth watching, of course there are better films out there but it does have some amazing gems!!

Well done Mr Ford looking good. 

William Eggleston: 21^st Century

Date: 15 January - 27 February 2010

Victoria Miro Gallery, City Road, Old Street tube.

We found out about this just before the Christmas break and we geekly couldn’t get it out of our one track photographic brains. Long awaited, last years list of exhibitions in London didn’t pull out any big guns in terms of photographers. We saw the brilliance of Jim Goldberg at The Photographers Gallery but apart from this it lacked any substantial playas. This is why opening 2010 with the legendary William Eggleston feels like its going to be a good year once again! And hopefully bring in some likened talent. Evidient with the arrival of the great Ervin Penn next week at the NPG.

So how did it go? Well firstly the Victoria Miro space is always a delight to visit whatever time of year. Its an epic boundless sea of white which was poignantly perfect to view the brash bravery of Eggleston prints.

William Eggleston has one of the most celebrated biographies out of all the photographers that have ever picked up a camera. Eggleston himself is the brand, the name, and the stigma of ‘one shot one kill’ photography.  Some of the most iconic photographs that exist in the likes of Phaidon’s Photo Book and 21^st Century Photography are almost certainly by the hands of Eggleston. His recent appearance on the  BBC in 2009 ‘Imagine Series’ his reputation as an artist is now nearly recognised in the family home along side the likes of David Bailey, Henri Cartier Bresson and Martin Parr.

The show spans over 10 - 18 images that are presented at eye level, printed in a very respectable standard print size. The show was not my any means trying to create anything dazzling or beguiling, It was clear that it was all about the content, which is were the debate with Eggleston always lies. The content of his work can never really sit into anyone box as his work manoeuvres itself effortlessly through landscape, documentary, portrait and the vernacular but still manage to hang within an Eggleston photograph.

His pioneering contribution to colour photography is still profoundly evident is his recent work , often banal scenarios with limited colour are brought to life by Eggleston attention to the details of the coloured object. These object seem to leap out of the images which goes someway to understanding why Eggleston has become such a revered name. His dedication to recording the way we live in all its ugly and beauty offers an easy dismissal to this work however we must remind our self’s that his work is an objectified observation of society that shy’s away from the poetic nature that photography can get so easily hung up.

We enjoyed this exhibition for documentary for documentary sake!. No it didn’t move me, and no I wasn’t particularly expecting this to however I found it amazingly honest and in this devoted honesty I then found it beautifully contemplated.

Here’s a few interviews by the great man.

See for yourselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OuILnb3GE8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXpdtc3YtnI&feature=player_embedded

Peace As Always.

Photography & Mash. 

Magnum Exhibition: ‘Political Landscapes’

Date:   2 December 2009 - 5 February 2010.

Magnum print room London, Gee Street.

Its not widely known that the notorious Magnum group have a gallery tucked away in east London, but they most certainly do and have been using this both as an archival room and a place to show the brilliance of their prolific photographers. Every so often I’m guessing they have the odd print or two lying around and when they decide their stock room is getting a tad full they chuck them on the walls for the rest of us to marvel!

This time, oddly, were talking about 15 - 20 Images that contribute to the genre of Landscape photography.  We are often presented with a façade of magnum photographers that they are mainly overtly documentary, up close and personal imagery however through establishment of narrative and place we often see an engagement with their immediate environment or ‘landscape’. By the nature of Magnums foundation, these images are not just the odd landscape here and there but a portrayal of the ghosts that one occupied the landscape, the recording of conflict, controversy and the political aftermath. 

The show is dominated by some refreshingly stunning work by Carl De Keyzer’s series Moments Before the Flood. Shot on large format the expanse of the imagery shows us the detail's that the eye so often overlooks, we are presented with the strength of natures abilities and Keyzer makes us see this starkly and honestly. The ever increasing awareness of global environmental change puts these images directly in the realm of political comment which is overtly the nature of the show. 

Magnum themselves have recognised the extreme shifts that photography has entered over the past decade. The device itself lending the ability to record and move with our times goes some way to explain the nature of this show. Magnum curator says: 

“The lines between art and documentary practice both within and outside the agency are becoming increasingly blurred and landscape photography is a genre at the forefront of these changes”

I found a gentle print amongst these oversized wonders that moved me more profoundly than the bowl over scale of the others. An image by Alex Majoli titled Meeting Point Karaleti, Georgia 2009. I can’t find this image anywhere to show you so you’ll have to go see it! Here’s a short clip by the photographer. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbu6q1CevCE

The wonders and brilliance of these Magnum shows is in the variation it offers. Getting the chance to see over 10 photographers in one room is a rare treat. We haven’t missed one!!!  It’s reassuring and a bit of an adventure if you’ve had a dull week.

We like. We like, We like! 

Photography & Mash. 

You should have heard of 125 Magazine if you’ve followed contemporary photography over the past 3 years. If you haven't, then its time to take off your sleeping masks. It's the infamous east-London-fashion-scene-meets-chin-scratching-photographic-gallery, all messed up into a beautiful bi-annual publication.

Apart from being one of very few magazines that devotes its pages to pure photography and imagery, each issue has a theme, which is set in advance so that it’s readership of both emerging and established photographers can submit images, resulting in a constant flux of thematic content. The responses to the themes are varied and compelling and make the magazine a prism, through which a single idea can be broken in to its constituent parts. By enabling this creative dialogue between the theme and the photographer the substance of the magazine is pushed toward the absolute edge of contemporary photography.

Last year, the boys over at 125 thought that we'd like to see some large scale photography in print, so they've branched out from the magazine and opened a pop-up gallery on Great Eastern Street. Viewing the images framed and mounted seems effortless and naturally, if you are a reader, there is a feeling of recognition as you see images from past issues on the gallery wall, poised and polished. The project closes the gap between the published world and the environment of the gallery, realising the potential of selected photographs from the magazine, and demonstrating an alternative route to the gallery wall. Great works by Steve Harris and Finlay Mackay are shown in all their glory and splendour.

There is also an array of amazing photography books that are rare to find in London. Some are from the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in America and there are breathtaking oversized books by Paolo Roversi, with a little bit of Robert Frank thrown in for good measure.

It’s a little gem and a unique chance to see some fresh work. Runs till end of January and even opens late on a Thursday nights 9pm!!!

51 Great Eastern Street, London EC2A 3HP
Open 7 days a week till 7pm and 9pm on Thursday nights.
http://www.125magazine.com/index.php?p_id=300&pg=391